Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy: Hell On Earth
by wrightteje
Summary: A huge earthquake rocks the cul-de-sac and, as it turns out, the entire world. As strange, bottomless fissures begin to open up around the world, it begins to seem like the end. Soon, things begin to emerge from the fissures, and it begins to seem like a whole lot more than just the end.
1. Act 0: Day 1 - 2

HELL ON EARTH

DAYS 1 - 2

DAY 1

Jonny shushed Plank as they stealthily broke off from the others. It was difficult, as he was always the life of every party and he couldn't ever have a moment to himself or Plank. Well, Jonny couldn't take all the credit. Say what you will, but Plank had a knack for chit-chat. "It's right through here, Plank!" he half-whispered, trying and failing to hide his excitement.

He looked back at all the other kids of the cul-de-sac, who were gathered around in Kevin's front yard around the bonfire. All the kids except the Eds, of course. They were off doing gosh knows what. But Jonny wasn't thinking about them, he was focusing on keeping his gleeful laughter quiet as he hopped over the fence, ran across the lane, jumped the other fence, and paused at the Park N' Flush. It almost took the excitement out of him. Almost.

He dove in like a fighter jet, his arms out to either side, his knees bent to keep him low to the ground, crop dusting, as the fighter pilots say. He kept low to the ground, ducking between trailer after trailer, picking up pace and wasting expensive jet fuel in the process as he hurried past the Kankers' place, even outside of which he could still hear the girls' evil laughter. He made it past them safely, whoo! That was a close one.

He heard a flimsy trailer door crack open like a beer can and a deep, manly voice called out to him, but Jonny just ignored him and Plank flipped the old drunk doofus the bird, and the two best friends were hidden in the twilight woods.

Jonny led Plank a satisfactory distance into the woods before they stood and shook off their stage whispers. "That was close, Plank!" he said to his buddy. "It's just this way." He pressed through heavy brush, and soon enough, they were there.

Jonny had brought a small flashlight from his dad's things, but he didn't need it. The pit had its own glow. "Take a look at this!" He held Plank out to look down into the gaping maw. Jonny could feel heat on his fingers, and he pulled Plank away before he caught fire. "Sorry, buddy."

Jonny cocked his head to look down the nearly perfectly round hole in the brush. There weren't any plants around it anymore. It was just singed earth. Three feet away, there was some grass that nursed a small flame. Jonny gasped and ran over to it and kicked his foot onto it, smothering it to death before it could spread and take out the whole forest. "We don't need a forest fire, do we, Plank?" He turned and looked at the hole again. Heat curled up from the hole and contorted the woods behind it like a road in the summer. "Pretty neat, huh? I found it exploring last night." He paused, listened to his friend. "I don't know where you were right then. Maybe asleep. But pretty neat, huh? I thought it was."

Day 2

Double Dee was still fuming from last night. Eddy was such a...ugh, a, a, a know-it-all, sometimes. Always acting like he knew everything. Ridiculous. He was so angry, he had neglected to get out of bed at the right time, four thirty on the dot, and was tossing and turning, all aflutter in anger with Eddy's pompous nature. It was hot, hotter than usual, although Double Dee just thought it was because he was hot under the collar about Eddy. He was sweating under the sheets, and threw them off in a hissy fit.

One might mistake Double Dee's violent flailing for the continuation of his hissy fit, but it was just the earthquake shaking him and his bed and the room and the whole world.

His bed was hopping off the ground as if possessed by the devil, pictures were falling off walls, sticky notes floated to the ground like butterflies, ignorant of the violence around them, Jim fell over and broke one of his arms, jars fell off his desk and clattered to the floor.

Double Dee was screaming in terror and clenching to the bed for dear life, his fingers tearing through the sheets and mattress and gripping the wooden bed frame itself. The whole world was roaring, vibrating. He thought his ears would explode from the noise. He heard an explosion off somewhere, far off, he heard car alarms, he heard the whole town and neighborhood around him bouncing in the frying pan that was the tectonic plate on which they lived.

Double Dee was too panicked at the time, but would later realize how peculiar it was, such an earthquake to hit them. They weren't even near a fault line. Not even close.

It lasted forever, it felt, to Double Dee, and in earthquake terms, yes, it did last an eternity. Seven minutes, the world shook.

Halfway through that time, Double Dee's mind became bored at the monotony of it and his mind stopped shaking, and while everything jumped and jittered around him, Double Dee was purely calm. He was calm enough to follow the sound of pants unzipping, a loud high pitched crack alongside it, and he turned to watch the wall across from the bed split open from one side to the other. The whole house might fall down on him.

Double Dee decided he'd rather die fighting to survive than complacent in his bed, so he hopped up out of bed and struggled to stand in the massive vibrations. He was out into the hallway when the ground shook so hard it sent Double Dee up, his head crashing through the ceiling and nearly taking his hat off, and then flat down like a pancake. He felt hot syrup pour down his forehead and into his eyes, and he thought How messy, messy, messy. It took him longer than it would usually have to realize it was blood. He touches his hand to his head and it came away thick with blood.

Double Dee struggled again to stand, succeeded, ignored the wall crack all along above the doorway to his parents' room up into the plaster of the ceiling and across to the front of the house. Double Dee, against every sense of reason he'd before known, was terribly afraid he and his house underneath him was about to tumble into the Earth, down into Hell itself.

Double Dee threw his weak body down the hallway, balancing himself on one wall or the other, one time planting his hand all the way through the wallpaper and tearing the back of it open on a loose nail or staple or snapped piece of wood or something, and then worsening the wound pulling it out again. He made it to the stairs and nearly fell through the bannister, threw himself down them as the bannister gave way and fell to the ground.

Double Dee was finally on the ground floor, and he clambered over to the front door and shouldered into it, dislocating his shoulder, he figured, and then remembering the door knob, turning it, remembering the lock, unlocking both the normal lock and the deadbolt, then opening the door and tumbling out on the doorstep and crawling down the yard until he reached the street, rolling over and laying out flat on his back, waiting to see his house cave in and crumble, implode on itself in a ball of fire and electrical blasts. The windows had all blown out, the front of the house was indeed cracked in several places.

Next door, Double Dee watched the neighbors' Mishubishi tear out the garage door and peel out down the driveway, whip backwards down the cul-de-sac, nearly taking a dazed Nazz out for the count, and then speeding for town, coming right at Double Dee. Double Dee processed the approaching car like a sloth, but upon realizing what a collision with the vehicle meant, quickly crawled up to his feet and flailed away, out further into the street, and he felt the vibrating air of the car, hit him in the back as it sped past. He didn't watch it, but he figured the Marcoreaus were already long gone, ready to take out any other fallen neighbor who got in their way. Double Dee could hear above all else Rolf in his house cursing the devils that were causing this in strange tongues and strangers turns of phrase, and he heard the animals out back squealing in abject terror, and then he heard only his only eardrums beating with his heart, beating with the alarms of cars all around the neighborhood. Double Dee heard the sudden, blaring silence of the world around him as the earthquake suddenly stopped.

Nazz fell over in the street and Kevin came tearing out of his front door like the Marcorearus had come tearing out of their garage, Kevin with a baseball bat, and he stood out in the street, dressed in nothing but his pajama bottoms, ready to beat the everloving shit out of any earthquake came back his way. He turned his head, surveying the street, saw Double Dee. "Oh, Double Dee, dude!" He came running to aid Double Dee, who was trying to stand up but couldn't since the world had shaken too many directions into him.

Kevin spun his head around as he came running for Double Dee, and saw Nazz on the street. "Oh, Nazz, dude!" And he changed trajectories and ran for her instead.

Double Dee watched him go and struggled to blink blood out of his eyes. He watched Kevin see Nazz get up, unscathed, and then stop and look between the two fallen comrades to decide who to tend to, and choose Double Dee.

Double Dee wasn't really watching Kevin. He was just breaking in this new, frenzied hyper awareness that he suddenly felt. He heard everything and felt it all in the strange vibrations still running through him. He saw Eddy emerge from his house, clutching his head with sleepy eyes. He saw Ed burst from his front door clutching a terrified sister swinging around and shouting, "Do it again, do it again, I want another ride!" Sarah was screaming for him to calm down.

Kevin was putting his hands all over Double Dee and was feeling him all up and Double Dee was thinking about how he was going to maintain his perfect attendance now. He wondered if school would be cancelled today. He figured it would, but he didn't want to take any chances. He was putting together an itinerary for what to do between now and when school started. He knew he'd have to go to the hospital to have his head tended to by professionals. He'd have to call his parents and report the damage. He'd have to get back home and get dressed. Find his homework from the wreckage in his house and find his backpack and try to put things back together in whatever extra time there was.

Nazz was next to him now, and Eddy was approaching him with an odd expression on his face: worry, like their argument yesterday hadn't even happened. Double Dee felt a warmth in his heart and he smiled at Eddy, which only seemed to make the fear on Eddy's face worsen, and he thought about how even though Eddy was a childish, impatient, impotent jerk, he was still a good friend deep down, still a good person deep down. "I love you, Eddy," said Double Dee, vaguely aware he was slurring. "You're a good friend, you know that? I'm sorry about last night."

"Zip it, sockhead, you're gonna give me a warm feeling inside," Eddy said, but distractedly, trying to put on a face of normalcy. He really was a good friend. Trying to console the injured. Then Double Dee didn't really remember anything else for a while.

When he came to, he was lying in a strange place. Nazz's back was in his face, and she was sitting, and he was looking at the edge of her pink panties sticking up out the back of her sweat pants. He looked around and saw the backs of others. The back of Eddy's head, which had a welt, aw, poor Eddy; the back of Ed's head and the calmed front of Sarah's, who had been crying but whose eyes were now closed. He saw Kevin, who was standing next to Eddy, and either they or the TV was talking.

Double Dee was sitting on a couch. Nazz's couch. Nazz's living room, he was in. He was in Nazz's house. The TV was talking. So were Kevin and Eddy, in hushed tones.

Double Dee laid there for a while, watching everything. He heard from the TV that there was a disaster, a terrible disaster (he figured the earthquake). There was mass panic at the moment. Looting, he heard. Hospitals were full-up, or hard to get to, or gone. Which would explain why he was on the couch in Nazz's house's living room, watching Nazz's house's living room's TV. Well, listening to it. He gathered that the earthquake had been big. Like, really, really big.

Then he heard a muffled scream, high pitched, and Sarah bolted up off of Edd's shoulder and ran away, shouting, "Jimmy!"

Kevin, Ed, Nazz, and Rolf followed her. Double Dee decided now would be a good time to sit up. He did. Eddy stood before the TV, playing with the remote in his hands. Double Dee could see the TV. He was no longer dazed. He sat up, then stood up, then felt really dizzy and stopped standing up. Eddy turned and saw Double Dee, now sitting on the couch with his head back, his eyes wide with the image of the massive holes torn across the western seaboard. Double Dee was thinking about the apocalypse when Eddy screamed, "Double Dee!"

"What's going on, Eddy? Don't spare me the gory details, I can take it!" Double Dee had covered his eyes with his arm, and was now screaming and sending spikes into his brain. Double Dee felt a pair of cold, clammy hands pick at his arm and pull it away from his face.

"Double Dee?" asked Eddy, lost like a child.

"What's happened? How many are dead?"

"I - I - I dunno! Lots, probably." He flopped down next to Double Dee, staring at the ceiling. "I never been in Nazz's house before, not for this long."

"Is everybody alright here?" Double Dee cocked his head to look at Eddy, but he couldn't, because his head had sunk too deep into the faux gray leather couch. He could see Eddy's hair sticking up, however, could see Eddy run his hand over it.

"You and Jimmy got it pretty bad. Jimmy got it worst. He is Jimmy, afterall. Always hoggin' attention."

"Why isn't he at the hospital? Why aren't I at the hospital? Has civilization already broken down so as to crumble public health organizations? Are we now factions in the crumbling wastelands?"

"Pipe down, sockhead. The hospital's still open, it's just everybody's hurt and tryin' 'a' get to it. It's too crowded. Kevin and Rolf and Nazz didn't want to make Jimmy suffer that long, so they're tryin' to treat him here until the doctor can arrive."

"Jimmy's general practitioner? Or paramedics?"

"They tried ta call Jimmy's doctor. Didn't nobody pick up though. 911's got a busy signal. I thought 911 didn't get busy signals."

"Did you call my parents? Are they okay?"

"Phones don't work. My mom went to work already. My dad was off on business, like your folks. Kevin's dad, too. We don't know where Jimmy's parents are. Nazz and Jonny's mom and dad went to town for help this morning, they ain't back yet. Rolf's parents are here. Ed's parents, too. But Ed's mom hurt her leg during the earthquake. She's sick at his house. And you know Ed's dad. He ain't even here when he's here. So it's just Mr. and Mrs. Rolf. And then it's just us and the creeps at the trailer park. Just like our parents not to be here when it counts, eh, Double Dee?"

"So you weren't able to speak with them?"

"No, but not for a lack 'a' tryin' I'm tellin' ya." Eddy began to mumble as neared the end of the sentence. "But, here, sockhead, they're probably okay. In their hotel, or whatever, and hey, they're in California, if anywhere's a good place to be during an earthquake, it's in one 'a' those buildings, they're built to withstand earthquakes, you know."

"Not that big. And if what we felt is just coming from the earthquakes out there...that's the worst place to be. That's ground zero, Eddy."

"Double Dee, that ain't the only place the earthquakes happened. The TV's sayin', it's so weird, that it was one big earthquake, or a couple hundred all at once, all around the world. The whole world's all busted up, Double Dee."

Double Dee stared at the ceiling. There was a jig-jagging crack running across it. "Oh."

Double Dee heard a noise and it took him longer than Eddy to realize where it came from and what it was. Eddy was already looking at the door before Double Dee turned around to look, to see the knob jiggling then the door opening quietly, and a large, bald head peeking in and darting large, mad eyes around the room, finally finding Eddy and Double Dee. It was Jonny. Slowly, Plank's head also crested through the doorway. "Hey, guys."

"Hey, Jonny," grumbled Eddy.

"Where're the others at?"

"They're upstairs with Jimmy. He was hollerin' a minute ago."

"Oh. Are you busy?" Jonny did not move from his position, his head halfway through the door with his nose pressed against the side of it, Plank looking in just below. They looked like an insane asylum Scooby and Shaggy. Double Dee didn't know which one would be which.

"No. Not really."

Jonny paused. His head turned and he spoke to Plank. "I know it, buddy. But they gotta know! It could be important."

"What in the world is it, Jonny?" Double Dee chimed in.

"Can you guys just come here? Follow us, and we'll show you?"

Double Dee and Eddy shared a look. Eddy sneered, "We guess."

"Okay… Come on then." And Jonny was gone.

"I don't know about this, Double Dee. Looks like the earthquake finally cracked his hard head."

"Eddy, do you really think Jonny would lead us astray? What is it you think he's going to do with us? Kill us and throw us in the creek? Come now, Eddy. You should be ashamed of yourself."

"You should watch TV, Double Dee. A lot of people should be ashamed of themselves."

They followed Jonny out to the street, Double Dee squinting into the harsh, searing sunlight, and they crossed the barren asphalt and walked up the sidewalk and turned out of the cul-de-sac. Double Dee became light headed, could feel his temples thumping at his brain, and gripped Eddy's shoulder for solidarity. Eddy put an arm around him. Jonny kept looking back at them to make sure that they were following, or that they weren't doing something he needed to know about. He stopped as they were cutting across the playground and looked at Eddy, holding Plank close like he was a prized family heirloom, with Plank's face covering his mouth. "I heard what you guys were saying." And then he turned back around and kept going. Double Dee looked at Eddy. Eddy grinned guiltily and they followed.

They cut through the woods and came out at the construction site. Jonny walked among the timber, among Plank's brethren, while Eddy and Double Dee kept their distance. Double Dee noticed first that Jonny couldn't thrown he and Eddy into the creek. The creek was dry.

Jonny, Eddy, and Double Dee stood on the creekbank, and stared into the empty bed. Dead fish lay strewn along the drying soil. "What the hell happened to the water!" shouted Eddy in frustration, not in query.

Nonetheless, Jonny answered, "You'll see." He walked down into the creek, across its bed, and the two Eds followed. Eddy looked uncomfortable walking on the bed, seemed to be afraid this was somehow a trap. Double Dee was fighting off thoughts of how unsanitary it was crossing the creek bed. It was still wet in places and it might get his shoes dirty.

Jonny led them to the trailer park. Eddy stopped, staring at the Kankers' trailer. "Uh-uh. I ain't goin' through there."

"Fine," Jonny groaned, and he took them the long way around, along the dry creek, and he led them into the woods.

Even Double Dee was getting worried about Jonny's intentions, as they walked and walked through the woods, but then they arrived. Eddy and Double Dee stood slack-jawed.

There was a long fissure through the forest floor. A long, gaping slit that glowed a bright, pulsating red inside. Double Dee stepped toward it, careful not to get so close as to stand on unsteady ground that could give way and send him down deep into the Earth. Eddy grabbed for him but didn't get too close. Jonny stood back, arguing quietly with Plank. The closer Double Dee got, the hotter it felt.

Double Dee cocked his head and looked down into the fissure. He felt an incredible amount of sweltering heat rising through him, like standing in front of the bonfire at Kevin's last night, standing too close and feeling your skin boil.

The fissure was deep, so deep; Double Dee could only see the red-hot molten glow down below. The falling, sloping sides of the ground descending into an infinite blaze. Jonny's voice cut into Double Dee's nerves, coming joltingly from right beside him. "Do you hear it?" Jonny cocked his head to listen. Reluctantly, Double Dee did the same. And he heard it. Scraping. Scraping, the noise echoing endlessly through the cavernous fissure. And something like heavy, labored breathing. Hot breath. "It sounds like somethin's clawin' it's way up, don't it?" inquired Jonny, staring at Double Dee, who acknowledged Jonny's gaze but did not reciprocate.

"Screw this!" grumbled Eddy, who let out a 'hmmph!' and turned curtly and stalked off.

"I better go too," squeaked Double Dee, who did feel terribly, terribly lightheaded. He was tired, weak, weaker than usual, and shaky. His eyes kept closing on him. He thought he might faint at any moment. He was cold, but figured he was sweating despite. There was a ringing in his ears. He felt this all meant something, but his mind wasn't working well enough to figure it out.

He was following the two boys out of the woods, felt the sweat dripping off his nose and felt the heaviness pulling on the backs of his eyes, weighing down his throbbing brain. The sunlight was beating like his heart, was too bright. Double Dee was trying to walk out of the woods, but he was so tired, he couldn't move his feet off the ground. He just shuffled through the fallen pine needles. He wished more than anything at that moment that one of the boys ahead of him would see him in his state and try to carry him back. Double Dee knew that he wasn't going to make it back to Nazz's house.

And he didn't. He didn't remember falling, but remembered lying there. He remembered Jonny and Eddy running to his aid, Jonny losing the madness in his eyes like Eddy lost his anger, and he felt content enough to sleep.


	2. Act 0: Day 3

DAY 3

Eddy woke up fine, but then he remembered his life and felt like shit. He laid in bed, staring at the ceiling for a long time before deciding to look at the window to see if it was light outside. He could see from the glow through the blinds that it was morning. He could tell by the sounds of the birds chirping and of Rolf bellowing his hour-long morning livestock ritual/chant that it was very, very early. He'd only woken up because his body had gotten so used to going to school.

But he wasn't going to school. Not today. Probably not for a good, long time. That should have been way more exciting than it was. He also didn't want to deal with his, or anybody else's, problems, so he rolled over onto his side and tried to go back to sleep.

As he tried to sleep, he was thinking. He thought about the glowing, noisy fissures. The putrid heat wafting off them. He thought about Double Dee unconscious in a bed next to _Jimmy._ Of all the people to wake up next to, he had to be the worst; especially given his particular set of preferences.

He thought about Jimmy. Jimmy hadn't looked too good. He thought about Ed, about visiting Ed and seeing him so worried and nervous sitting next to his mom, who looked about as good as Jimmy, who looked about half dead. He thought about Ed's dad sitting in the recliner and staring at the TV. He didn't like to think about that, so he didn't.

Eddy decided he wouldn't be able to sleep anymore today, so he got up and put on some clothes. He'd decided last night he'd start sleeping naked since his mom wouldn't be there to wake him up. He felt so thrilled lying there with his bare dong touching the bed sheets. He laid there with a grin on his face for a little while, before falling asleep soon thereafter. It had been a taxing day.

He felt stupid now, pulling on pants, naked in his room. So childish. He zipped his pants and slid open his door to the backyard and stood out there trying to figure out what to do with so much time. He couldn't do scams, because his friends were busy and they were hurt and he didn't feel right acting like himself with them how they were.

He stood out in the yard and looked at the morning. Funny. He'd never seen one before. Not of his own volition, anyways. He could go over to Ed's, check up on his mom. Or go see Double Dee at Nazz's. But then he'd have to go see Jimmy too, and Sarah, since she'd gotten the okay to sleep over with Jimmy and make him feel better and make herself feel better because at least then she didn't have to think so much about her sick mother. She could just look at Jimmy and associate him with being sick, and only him, not her mom. Eddy got sad thinking about shit sometimes. He didn't like to think too much, not about other people. It wasn't like he didn't have problems like everyone else. He did. It wasn't so bad when he thought about his own problems. It was just that he was used to his. He was used to his dad's drinking, not Ed's dad's. He was used to his parents neglecting him, not Double Dee's. Or Ed's too for that manner. Even if his mom was nice.

Eddy decided to go visit Ed first. He was closer, after all. And he didn't have so many people to see there, so early. Just Ed. His mom would usually speak with him, smiling, when he came over, but with her sick, not so much. Ed's dad didn't do much of anything, so he didn't have to worry there.

Eddy went back inside, pulled on his shirt, and went out the front. It was quiet. Dark. Power was out. Couldn't hardly tell the cracks from the rest of the black. Outside, he stopped to take inventory. He looked at all the houses, their cracked, half-destroyed exteriors. Double Dee's house was empty. The Marconeaus' house was empty. Jimmy's house was empty. Jonny's, probably empty; Jonny spent as little time indoors as possible. Kevin slept over with Nazz and those guys, so that house was empty too. The two unsold houses on the streets, empty. Ed's house looked all musty and dying, if only just because Eddy knew what he'd face inside.

Eddy steeled himself up, tried to think up an approximation of how he usually acted, stuck his chest out, cocked a big grin and went over.

Inside, he heard the TV running recordings of _Everybody Loves Raymond,_ since Ed's dad didn't want to watch all the dour news. Eddy couldn't blame him, really. He felt really similar to Ed's dad. He didn't like to think a lot about that, either.

Eddy always felt uncomfortable walking past Ed's dad splayed out in his chair. He didn't know why; he never spoke. But he always crept quietly past or came in the back door. He hadn't been thinking about it today, or he would have. He nearly jumped out of his skin when Ed's dad's crackly voice called, "'Ey!"

Eddy turned to Ed's dad. "Yessir?" Ed's dad sat in his recliner, leaned over on one elbow. His face was all yellow like Ed's, but he was missing more teeth. He wore a wifebeater, because of course he was wearing a wifebeater. He didn't have to go to work today. Eddy's dad wasn't working and he and Eddy had an unspoken understanding that he'd never tell his dad when Ed's dad stayed home all day, watching TV. Ed's dad looked angry today. Ed's dad didn't speak too much, so his voice kept going in and out. "You ain't - ain't gonna talk back at me, too, are you?"

"Nosir."

"Huh. You're about the only boy in this neighborhood knows when to keep his place." He was already flat in his chair again, back to watching TV.

"Did you and Ed have a fight, Mr. Ed's Dad?" Eddy asked meekly. Eddy waiter a minute, but Ed's dad did not respond. Eddy walked off, hoping Mr. Ed wouldn't speak again, and he didn't, so Eddy went upstairs.

As he went up, he was struck with the sudden scent of feces. It reminded him of visiting his Grandmother in the old folk's home. She always smelled like shit. Literally. Eddy figured it was Ed's mom. Eddy suddenly didn't want to visit Ed anymore. Halfway up the stairs, he stopped. No, he couldn't abandon his friend like that. If there was one thing Eddy's dad did for his son, it was beat the idea of loyalty into him.

When he reached the top of the stairs, he looked down the hallway. He didn't see nobody. The door to Ed's parents' room was open, but he could just see the edge of the bed. He couldn't see Mrs. Ed's Mom in there. He couldn't see Ed either.

Eddy went back downstairs and left out the backdoor, staying close to the wall so if Ed looked out a window, he wouldn't be able to see Eddy sneaking around. Round front of the house, Eddy took off and hid around the side of Jimmy's house. Through the windows, all the rooms were dark. Eddy didn't like that.

Eddy stood outside of Nazz's house and thought about whether or not to knock before going inside. If he just went inside, it would make Eddy feel like he and the other kids were a big happy family. But it might also seem like Eddy was not aware of boundaries. If he knocked, he risked appearing distance to the others. And now more than ever, without the other Eds to help him along, he didn't want to be alone.

Before he could decide, Kevin answered the door and ushered Eddy in. "What's up?" asked Eddy.

Kevin looked confused. "Whadda ya mean?"

"Why'd you shove me inside like that, shovelchin?"

"I was just lettin' you in, God, you were standin' outside like a weirdo, rubbin' a hole in your chin. What, anything up with you? You look nervous."

"Nah. It's nothin'." Eddy went silent, as he'd taken up the habit in the last twenty-four hours. Kevin was silent too.

"Well, uh, if you need somethin', if you need help or anything, I ain't got nothin' ta do. So if you want me to do somethin'..." Silence again.

"Nah." Kevin looked disappointed. Sad too. The two boys just stood around, hands on hips. "So where's Nazz?"

"Oh, she's out, uh, I think lookin' for help, for her, you know, parents and all that stuff."

"Yeah." Eddy thought about the parents. He felt Kevin was too, because the silence between them got more weight, more uncomfortable.

"So how's Jimmy and Double Dee?"

Kevin was relieved to answer, to cut short the silence. "They're a'ight. Jimmy don't look good, but he gets like that all the time. Double Dee's talkin'. He gets up and walks around and he seems alright till he gets real tired or confused 'r angry or sick. He seems good, you wanna go talk ta him? We been talkin' all mornin'. Can't shut the dork up."

"Yeah, sure, I gotta nothin' better ta do."

On their walk up to Nazz's guest room, they went silent again. Kevin got nervous and stumbled in asking "So you think everything's gonna be alright?" And then the silence got heavier. "My bad," mumbled Kevin.

They reached the room, and Kevin opened the door. "Hey, guys, you got a visitor." Eddy poked his head in to see if everybody was as sad as everyone outside. Sarah and Jimmy and Double Dee all met him with smiles. Sarah and Double Dee sat on Jimmy's bed. At Jimmy's feet was a tray of tea it seemed Sarah had made.

"Hey, Eddy," said Sarah chipperly. "How'd ya sleep?"

"Good," Eddy mumbled, still uncomfortable. It was like a dollhouse nightmare. Porcelain smiles all around. Pulsing veins on every forehead. They shouldn't try so hard; they're likely to blow a gasket or pop the wrong artery in their brains.

"Eddy, how have you been since everything happened? I've been worried half to death," said Double Dee, who made Eddy's mind feel lighter than it had since the night before last.

Sarah piped in, "I told him Eddy ain't gonna have no trouble with this. He's seen worse things, haven'cha Eddy?"

"Yeah, sure. Hey, Sarah, you been home yet?"

Silence again. Kevin was glaring a hole in him.

"No, not yet," Sarah answered. "Is it bad?"

"It don't seem good."

Sarah flinched and looked at her hands in her lap, at her tea cup, which Eddy noticed was shaking. "Well, I better get over there, I guess. See ya later, Jimmy."

"See ya later, Sarah," squeaked Jimmy, who looked better. Sarah stood around a bit too long to not seem desperate.

"How ya feelin', squirt?" asked Eddy more sincerely than he meant to.

"Great, thanks for asking, Eddy. Just a bunch of bumps and bruises. I'm just a lightweight, is all!" He was holding Sarah's free hand as she gathered up her and Jimmy's tea cup and Double Dee offered up his. She took it and piled it all on the tray and went to leave. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said, turning back to the others. "Did you guys wanna keep the tea, make yourself some more without me?"

Double Dee held up a finger. "I'd be glad to whip up another batch of tea, Sarah, in time for your return!"

"Thanks, Double Dee," grinned Sarah, who seemed more at ease with Double Dee than with Eddy, which annoyed Eddy. She handed off the tray and went to leave. "Boy talk, you guys," and she was gone down the hallway. Eddy sneered at her femininity.

The boys were silent for a bit. Kevin cleared his throat and asked, "So, is it really that bad at Ed's house?"

"Yeah, I think so." They went silent again. Eddy felt like he brought it with him everywhere he went, the uncomfortable silence, the anxiety of uncertainty.

"Terrible," Double Dee said, grimly shaking his head, "I feel so deeply for Ed and his family. Such an awful, awful tragedy. I hope she gets better." Eddy wasn't sure if Double Dee's memory was just that good from when Eddy told him that yesterday morning or if somebody else elaborated yesterday afternoon or this morning.

Jimmy wanted to ask something. Eventually everybody noticed and he took his cue. "How's everything outside, you guys?" Double Dee looked to Kevin and Eddy for answers as well.

"Uh…" Kevin said, rubbing the back of his neck, glancing at Eddy.

"It's gonna be fine," chimed Eddy. "I'm surprised everybody's as worried as they are. Everything should be back to normal in no time." Eddy looked to the other boys. Jimmy seemed complacent, Kevin seemed sickened, staring at the floor with his arms crossed and face tense, but Double Dee was staring at him so hard he thought Double Dee was gonna shoot a laser through his chest. Eddy thought about how much he missed Ed.

"You guys know where Jonny is?" asked Kevin.

"Who knows. Off in the woods with his little friend, I bet," said Jimmy so confidently. Jimmy was smiling, but now the other boys weren't.

"Hey, Eddy, you wanna go see if we can find him?" asked Kevin. Eddy nodded.

"Oh, yeah, sure. We'll let the _girls_ talk amongst themselves." He and Kevin left as Jimmy stuck his tongue out at them.

"Same old Eddy," grumbled an annoyed Jimmy. Double Dee was notably silent.

As they went down the stairs, Kevin shook his head. "I had to get outta there, man. I couldn't stand that any more. I - I - Rolf's home doin' I don't know what, Nazz is gone and I'm stuck with you dorks and Sarah. I can't believe any of this, man. It's so surreal."

"Yeah. I can't believe it either." It seemed the only way Eddy could speak any more was with an annoyed grumble.

"You really think it's gonna be fine? Really? With the fuckin' glowing hole in the woods and all that noise it was making, all that damage the earthquakes did all over?"

"No," Eddy said. Kevin stopped at the base of the stairs as Eddy went on ahead. Eddy stopped and looked back. Kevin was sitting, his eyes wide in horror and fear.

"Goddamnit, man. This is - this is really stressful. You know? Imagine having to be a leader, like me. Havin' all that responsibility. Everybody thinks I'm so strong, like I can get 'em through it all. Like I'm not their age too. I - I - I just can't, man, I wish I was...you, or Double Dee, or Jimmy, or Ed's Dad or somebody like that. I wish I didn't have so much shit to do."

Eddy didn't know what to say. He didn't know if Kevin's spiel was justified or narcissistic. If only he had Double Dee to think about all that for him. As it stood, Eddy mumbled, "Yeah." He stood there with Kevin on the stairs. Kevin was staring at the floor. He didn't talk for a while. "So, are we gonna go look for Jonny or what? Snap to it." Kevin looked up at Eddy. "Come on, then," continued Eddy impatiently.

"Alright," smiled Kevin and he extended a hand to let Eddy help him up.

As they were walking out of the house, into the street, they saw Rolf and his dad coming across the street toward them. "Ah! Here they are now! It is two of the boys I have told you about, Papa, it is the shovel-faced Kevin and the three-haired Ed-boy!" called Rolf to his enormous wooly mammoth of a father, who followed closely behind. Eddy and Kevin altered their paths to meet up with them.

Face to face, Rolf's Dad stood towering above them with his combed-over blue hair, thick, bushy mustache and heavy brow which nearly covered his eyes, his huge sloping shoulders, on one of which hung a large, empty burlap sack, his flannel shirt and suspenders, his big meaty arms, his combed-over hairy forearms, his dirty jeans and workman's boots. "It is you who is the leader?" asked the mountainous man, shoving a fire extinguisher-sized finger into Kevin's chest.

"Me? Yeah, I guess so," grunted Kevin, looking over at Eddy, more than slightly intimidated.

"How are you rationing the food, yes? Must you use our cattle and chickens? Our goats? Are you cultivating your own garden, or must you - eh, eh - suffice off our own private share? Do you have a plan for no incest monsters? Do you have, what is it, child Rolf?"

"The bladder of a bull, yes?"

"Yes, the bladder of a bull?"

Eddy and Kevin exchanged glances. Kevin raised an eyebrow. "Uh...no?"

Rolf's father lets out a long, deep, "AAAAAAHHHH," in disappointment, throwing his arms up at his son, who cowers in shame. Rolf's dad continues, "You are terrible leaders! We must overthrow you, be it by spilling your innards in the pig trough or by legislation."

"Oh-okay, sure, okay. Yeah."

"Shall you step down peacefully, force us into a physical battle for mortal conquest, or must we pluck the hairs from the neck of the swine to battle our popularity?"

"You can have it."

"Do you step down peacefully?"

"Yeah, Yes, sure."

"Ah, Rolf, if it was this easy in old country, we would never have had to leave. Now, useless hat and three haired boys, where is the capital of your government? We must pillage it and take its women."

Kevin pointed at Nazz's house. "Uh, actually, it's not really my say, it's Nazz's house, she should really - "

"Where is this Nazz? Must we use violence to rid the proud one of his domicile?"

"Papa," offered Rolf, "Nazz is but a woman."

"Ah! So we can rape her!"

"No, Papa."

"If it comes to such, we will! There will be no resistance!" He smacked Rolf on the back of his head hard enough to give his son whiplash. "Do not supercede my will again, boy! You are playing with inferno!"

"Ah, yes, Papa."

"Now, we go." He put his arm around Rolf and lifted his head so as not to cast an eye on Eddy or Kevin and he lead Rolf toward Nazz's house. "You boys go, live the rest of your days shamefully, in exile. We must be going, yes." And they went.

Eddy and Kevin watched Rolf's father and Rolf walk triumphantly to Nazz's house. "That's probably not gonna end up being good," Kevin said.

"Nope," replied Eddy.

A long pause of silence.

Kevin clapped his hands together. "Well, that deals with my problem. You wanna try an' find Jonny with me?"

"I dunno. I'm tryin'a' figure if watchin' Rolf's dad restructure Nazz's house is gonna be worth the trouble of listening to him blab his mouth."

"Oh, man, Nazz is gonna freak when she gets back." Kevin stood there, contemplating what to do. Waste his time away looking for Jonny or follow the new administration's rise to power. Eddy was in the same predicament. Either way, he felt safe. Rolf's dad knew what to do. He was strong. Smart. Most of all, he was an adult. He knew what to do. It wasn't just the kids ruling like in that book with the fat kid who wears glasses on an island and dies.

Nazz stood at the edge of Main Street, her heart in her throat. She felt weak and sweaty, lightheaded and shaky, and it wasn't even the sight of Peach Creek's devastation that had done it to her. She'd felt sick since the Cul-de-Sac. Maybe her fear was taking a physical toll. She'd always had a bad habit of taking her anxiety and fear and hiding it somewhere deep within herself; she'd stow her weaknesses away under rickety chairs in her mind, and she'd pay no heed to them till they'd break and send everything crashing down inside her.

She really should have seen this one coming. She should have known the destruction and chaos would screw her up something awful. She could feel the tears welling up on her lower eyelids.

She took a look around, checking for sexual predators or looters or combinations thereof, then sat on the ground of the empty lot sandwiched between the AKA Shoes and the Leaving Peach Creek sign heading out of town, leaning against the wall of the shoe store. She pulled her knees up, crossed her arms over them and laid her head in them to cry.

But she couldn't. The cork wouldn't pop out. The brimming tears hung in place on their ledges and refused to move. Suddenly she wanted to punch and kick things, tear her hair out, scream, do anything to let it all out. But she thought better of it; not here, where anybody could hear and come running. You never know who's prowling the streets when the law falls apart, waiting to rob or rape or generally terrorize.

Nazz allowed herself only to bang the back of her head on the concrete wall of AKA Shoes as she tried to take her mind off the mounting frustration and rage inside her. But all her mind turned to were terrible, terrible things. Her missing parents. The hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people dead across the country and apparently the world. The uncomfortable sense of End Times creeping up on her with the onslaught of impossible natural disaster. Hell must have been freezing over. The Devil getting ready to spill his seed across the globe. Rapture.

But Nazz didn't believe in the Rapture. She was an agnostic. It was the only way to be wholly non-denominational. To keep all choices at arm's length. And her parents ate it all up.

She kicked herself for refusing Kevin's offer of one of his father's many pistols. It wasn't like Kevin would be out much. Ten bullets out of the eight hundred or so locked up in the gun cabinet.

What was she even planning to do? Find her parents, Jonny's parents? Did she hope to find her or Jonny's dad with his leg trapped under a fallen beam, trapping the others? Did she hope she'd run into them on the way back? Did she think she'd follow them like a hunter on their tracks through Peach Creek and into the city? Save the day and all that jazz? She didn't know what she thought.

She thought about turning around and going back. She wasn't abandoning anyone or anything. Just being smart. Her parents, Jonny's parents, they were all fine. Caught up in some big long line at the National Guard, waiting for rations and supplies. Coming back from gathering rations. Dead in an aftershock, under ten tons of rubble or lined up in a ditch, their pockets emptied by murderous drifters on the broken roads.

Nazz shook her head. She told herself everything was going to be okay. It always had been for her. Her mom's cancer scare had turned out to be nothing. The time she thought she'd broken her leg in the creek, she'd been fine. And she'd gotten Kevin to carry her a ways. That was great. Everything was gonna be okay.

Even though some shrieking, creaking, weakened part of her inside was screaming otherwise.

But she didn't even believe in the apocalypse.

Jonny knew they were dead just by the color of them, and the fact that they hung from their necks. They were blue, like Jonny's thumb when he'd wrapped it all up in rubber bands and his dad screamed at him he could have lost his finger for it. They were blue, because they'd suffocated to death.

Jonny propped Plank up against an oak cousin, and he was sure to turn his friend's face away from the grisly scene as he pulled his pocket knife and scaled the branch overhead to cut them down.

Jonny hardly thought about Plank at all during the endless minutes he took cutting Jimmy's parents from their nooses. All he could think about was hopelessness. He didn't feel hopeless, certainly not _that_ hopeless, and his heart strained at the thought that they'd gotten that bad. They must have figured it was all over, that it would only get worse, that there was no saving the earth now. Jonny could tell Jimmy's dad was weak, but he'd never suspected it of Jimmy's mom.

What a horrible thing they'd done. They'd left poor little Jimmy all alone.

When their bodies dropped, Jimmy's dad's legs broke. Jonny'd never seen a compound fracture before, and he got so lightheaded at the sight he nearly passed out. He sat a moment, then pulled their bodies out straight, next to one another, and hid them with brush. Then he set off back toward the back of the Cul-de-Sac. They'd hung themselves only a hundred feet from their own backyards. Jonny could hear Eddy's piercing voice even that far into the woods.

Halfway back to his backyard, he remembered he'd left Plank with Jimmy's family and ran back to grab him.

Eddy and Kevin decided one of them needed to keep control of Rolf's father as he pillaged Nazz's house, leaving Kevin alone to search for Jonny and that old hunk of wood as Eddy broke off from Kevin at the Van Bartonschmeer residence and went inside to watch the show. He only wished he had popcorn.

Eddy followed Rolf and the older Rolf through the battered remains of Nazz's house's front door and walked in on Rolf and his father rifling through the kitchen, with Double Dee trapped cowering in the corner screaming at Mr. Rolf's Dad to "please be reasonable!" surrounded by the shattered remnants of Nazz's tea set. Rolf was frantic and his father calm and collected, brutally dismantling the cabinets and refrigerator. The large old man tossed the items he determined as refuse over his shoulder, and Rolf caught each item, gently placing one after the other in a stack on the kitchen table, struggling to keep up with his dad's pace. "Papa!" Rolf shouted desperately.

Double Dee locked eyes with Eddy and screamed, "Good lord, man, save yourself!"

Eddy looked from Double Dee to Rolf's father and watched the hulking foreigner tear off a cabinet door and determine a box of Corn Pops as inedible, flinging it away, sending his son flying across the kitchen and tackling it in the air, bolting back to the careful stack on the table and placing it at the top of its frail pyramidal shape. "Papa, you must take more care in your ransacking! Please, papa! You frighten the cowardly Ed Boy!"

Rolf's father began flinging his trash at Double Dee, illiciting another set of screams from him as Rolf farted back and forth, catching each piece. Old Man Rolf pulled out a sack of potatoes, snorted their odor, found them satisfactory, and snapped open the burlap sack, throwing the potatoes inside. "Sweet papa, I beg you, unhand the Nazz girl's spud collection! Thus outburst holds no reason, papa!"

"My small, small boy, these items are ripe for the taking. We have rightfully overthrown the acting government of the, the, ah, Cul-de-Sac, therefore making their splendors ours for the taking."

"Papa, I fear the new country abides by unusual customs! This is not the way of these people!"

Rolf's father peered over his shoulder to regard his son. "But it is the way of ours! Please, Rolf, aid your frail father in his pillaging of goods! We must be prepared for your good cousin's arrival. Remember how his consumption habits last visit! They _frightened_ your poor father!" Before the mountainous man could turn back around, he caught a glimpse of Eddy out of the corner of his eye, and turning his broad, chuffing form to face him, glowering over him. Double Dee wheezed a desperate request at Eddy again, begging him to leave. But before Eddy could process Double Dee's words, Rolf's father roared, "You dare refute the leadership capabilities of Freddie Friedbjorn Giertrolv?"

Eddy gaped at the huge man, turned his eyes to Doible Dee's terrified face for a moment, then looked back at Friedbjorn, putting on a stern face, jutting his lower jaw to make it look like he had a chin and, moreover, a strong one. "Is that English you're speakin'?"

"To the deathlands with you!" screamed Freddie, Mr. Rolf's Dad, as he grabbed Eddy by his shirt and hoisted him from the Earth's sweet embrace, sending his tiny little legs swinging, kicking through the air in a desperate struggle to find purchase. "Papa, no!" reprimanded Rolf impotently as Double Dee wailed behind them.

Eddy heard a small pair of feet stomping down the stairs behind him as he gave up his search for ground, letting his legs dangle limp from his torso, which had been engulfed in Rolf's father's grasp.

"Just who the fuck are you supposed to be!" shrieked a low, grating voice from the foot of the stairs.

Freddie Giertrolv looked past Eddy, who craned his neck around to see Sarah mounting the floor in a stern position, the very placement of her legs apart and firmly pressed to the floor and her hands on her hips a challenge to Freddie's hierarchical pedigree.

"What is this? Do I now face two foes over the throne of the neighborhood?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, mister, but this is Nazz's house and she's gonna be very fuckin' angry at you if you mess _anything_ in her house up!"

"You are but a puny girl, ripe for sexual advances! You pose no threat to Friedbjorn! I will -" Sarah cut him off by her lifting one leg, yanking her shoe off, and launching it at Friedbjorn's head. Eddy ducked, retracting his head into his shoulders like a turtle into its shell as the shoe sailed over his hair, smacking Freddie's cheek and sending ripples across his face, skewing his mouth and lips as they tried to form words. In a rage, Friedbjorn spiked Eddy into the floor and balled up his fists.

"Sarah?" cried Jimmy's weak voice from upstairs. "Sarah, is everything alright?"

"Yeah, Jimmy," Sarah shouted, glaring at Friedbjorn, "I just gotta take out some'a Nazz's trash!"

"Insolent girl!" shrieked Friedbjorn, his face flush in embarrassment, following it up with the frenzied wail of "I will bring you to none other than your very maker!" quickly and as if it were all one word.

Eddy looked up to see Rolf cowering behind his father, gnawing away at his nails like a woodchipper eats through a log.

Kevin cast his gaze back toward Nazz's house at the sound of shrieking voices as he rounded Double Dee's house, taking the street out of the Cul-de-Sac, banking around Double Dee's backyard and into the woods. If Jonny was anywhere, he was in those damn woods.

As he turned into the treeline, he looked both ways down the street running the woods' length. In several places, the road was fractured. Every house lining the street had been damaged in some way. It was like a nightmare for Kevin. He feared nothing like societal collapse. All rules and boundaries broken down. Anything could happen. There would be no order any more. And there was no filter between him and the hell scape of the world now, not if his dad never came back.

If this was as bad as the news had made it out to be, he figured he might never see his mom again, not like that was such a bad thing since she broke it off with dad. But the prospect of his father never coming home terrified Kevin. He really would be all alone in the world then. He would have to be a leader not only over the other kids on the block, if things fell through with Mr. Rolf's Dad, but over himself as well. He had to run his own life without his father's sage guidance.

Kevin was barely there in the woods behind the Cul-de-Sac he called home when Jonny saw him moving among the trees in his trance. All Jonny saw was the lifelessness behind Kevin's eyes then, and he was afraid.

But still, Jonny called out to Kevin, if only to attempt to assuage his fears.

And, like a Godsend, Kevin snapped from his trance and turned toward Jonny. "Ole woodboy, dude," Kevin said, quickly approaching him as if thankful to see him for once, "we were looking all over for ya."

"You were looking for me? Why?" Jonny asked, worried about what he'd done or what they thought of his discovery of the fissure in the woods to make them mad at him.

"We were worried about you, dude. The whole world's coming down around us, if you didn't know."

Kevin's smile faded as he noticed Jonny's stiffness, taking on the attributes of Plank, regarding Kevin with anxiety and no small amount of fear and confusion. Kevin could see in Jonny's furrowed brow and steadily working adam's apple that all he wanted right now was for Kevin to take the reigns. "You okay, dude?"

"I think I need to show you something, Kevin. Follow me." Kevin noticed Jonny was clutching a flat headed shovel with white knuckles. It seemed Kevin wasn't the only one walking through the woods that morning with something on his mind.

Eddy slipped past Rolf and Friedbjorn and huddled with Double Dee in the corner as Sarah faced off with the blue human sasquatch, watching them scream back and forth. Jimmy stood behind Sarah, propped up on well-worn crutches, egging Sarah on with confident cries of war. "Who died and made you king of shit mountain?" taunted Sarah as Jimmy stuck his tongue out at good ole Freddie.

"The proprietorship of this arena were rightfully ceded to myself and my kin through agreement! No blood has been shed for this land! But it soon shall be!" Friedbjorn was huffing and puffing like an enraged bull and the only thing keeping him off Sarah was Rolf's straining figure, his own work boots planted in the linoleum tile of the floor and arms bulging with muscle. "Papa! I beg of you!" Rolf grunted.

"What kinda dipshit 'ceded' you this land?" Her voice slipped from testosterone-driven bravado to the whiny, I-told-you-so voice of a girl Sarah's age. "This is the private property of Nazz Van Bartonschmeer, and she ain't even here to cede the thing to ya!"

"This country's infernal legal boundaries aggravate Friedbjorn Giertrolv!" Friedbjorn rolled up his sleeves. "I would prefer this indignance come to blows!"

"What, are ya gonna beat up a girl? This isn't your place to pillage, Mr. Caterpillar Lip!"

"You insult Friedbjorn!" screamed Freddie with Rolf straining to hold him back.

"Listen, Lumberjack Bigfoot, I don't know who said you could have our Cul-de-Sac but whoever it was musta had their teeth clackin' outta their butts!"

"Who's land is this, woman? Who leads this land? You tell me this boy lies to not only Friedbjorn, but his beloved son Rolf as well?" wailed the shrieking tea kettle that was Rolf's father, pointing at Eddy, who tried to make himself as small as possible.

"That kid's not our leader, you idiot! He's just some moron with hair moose! If anyone runs this place, it sure as hell ain't him!"

"This leader must be you then, Banshee?"

"You're damn tootin' I am! Now get the hell outta my friend's house!"

"You are but a frail girl! You know nothing of legislation!"

"Who says I gotta be a lawyer? I got good business sense!" she sneered, jabbing her thumb at herself. "If you think you're such a good leader, go start up a dictatorship of Wilfred and the other stupid animals over there at your house!"

Freddie stepped back and Rolf tumbled forward, hitting the floor, then quickly scrambling back up. "You think you know better than Freddie Friedbjorn Giertrolv? Better than his beloved son Rolf Giertrolv? If you think this is true, go forth and grasp the unable dead hand of the hen, yes? And let her drag you into the barren soil! Your loved ones will rot in dead earth, yes! Come, beloved Rolf! We are leaving!"

Friedbjorn stomped out. Rolf followed him closely, pivoting on his hip to smile guiltily to his friends, waving goodbye with a nervous chuckle.

Friedbjorn slammed the busted front door behind him, and it fell off its hinges. "Who needs 'em!" shouted Sarah in triumph. "Oh, Sarah," grinned Jimmy, limping forward and clutching Sarah, "you're my hero!"

Eddy let go of Double Dee, standing in the destroyed kitchen, trying to look noble. "I held my ground on 'im too, ya know." Sarah and Jimmy sneered at Eddy.

"Yeah, right," Jimmy said indignantly, and Sarah helped him back up the stairs to his bed. "What are you even doin' down here, silly? You gotta get your rest, work your strength back up!"

"You're right, Sarah. But I just couldn't miss the juicy stuff!"

Eddy grunted and walked out. He could tell Double Dee was watching him, pitying him as he went, which turned his stomach over hot and popping, like a strip of bacon on a hot skillet. "Thank you, Eddy," he said.

"Yeah, right," mumbled Eddy on his way out, leaving Double Dee alone in the wreck of the kitchen.

Double Dee stood and put his hands on his hips among the carnage. "Oh dear," he said, and then set about work to right everything. There was much to do but he was feeling better, and he was capable. By the time Nazz was back, yessiree, he'd have everything back in tip-top shape. He was sure of it.

And before long, Eddy shuffled back in and went about joining Double Dee in his cleaning, quiet but for intermittent mumbling. He wouldn't look up to meet Double Dee's gaze. Poor Eddy, Double Dee thought. It may have been hard to tell sometimes, but there was a lot of good in Eddy, even if no one else saw it, including Eddy himself.

Kevin took his hat off and ran his hand through his already thinning red hair before snapping the backwards cap back into place on his noggin. He was pale and felt that way, standing over the rotting bodies of Jimmy's parents out in the woods behind the Cul-de-Sac.

He could barely catch a hold of his breathing, just barely keeping it in control enough to make sure Jonny didn't think anything of it, but it was all getting to be just too much. Jonny's eyes were boring a hole in his head, and, goddamnit, it felt just like Plank's were digging in too. They wanted him to do something about this, and Kevin could surmise what he thought Jonny wanted, but not what _needed_ to be done. God, what even _needed_ to be done? It was all too much.

Jonny hadn't needed to open his yap to tell Kevin what had happened to them. Jonny hadn't even taken the nooses off their necks. Hell, maybe he'd tried, but the rope had burrowed too deep into their throats to dig out without tearing them up. The rope loops looked like they crushed Jimmy's mom and dad's necks to half their size.

Buying time, Kevin took his hat off again and ran his hand through his hair again, replaced the cap again. "Fuck, man," he mumbled, remembering to be self-conscious about the parts of his head where you could see through the mop of red. Just one more fucking insult to injury. Kevin thought about how few parents they had left. Rolf's dad and Ed and Sarah's parents. Maybe his dad if he ever came back. He'd come back. So would Nazz and Jonny's parents. They'd all come back. Not Jimmy's parents though. They were too far gone. Their eyes were empty, shrivelling up. They'd filmed over gray. Did all dead bodies do that? And did they all smell so rank? They'd both shit themselves.

"Alright," Kevin said, stepping in close to Jonny, who stepped in close too, and the two boys were inches apart, chins jutting over each other's shoulders, Kevin's chin especially. "Look, Jonny, we can't tell Jimmy about this. Not yet. We can't tell Ed or Sarah either. They'd blab for sure. We keep this between you and me, alright? And I'll figure something out, okay?"

Jonny listened intently, nodding intermittently, looking at the side of Kevin's head just as often. Kevin knew that in some strange part of Jonny's head he was eating this up, not the deaths, just this interaction. Kevin knew he was bringing Jonny in with him on this. He was making this whole thing clandestine, putting it just between the two of them. Now, for however brief an interim before decision time, Jonny had something with Kevin, just Kevin, that connected them and brought them close like they were as Kevin spoke with him then. Jonny ate it all up like he hadn't had a meal in months. He was desperate for anything to bring him close to anybody.

So Kevin clapped a hand on the back of Jonny's neck, and he pulled away from their huddle, Jonny mirroring his movements, trying to look like he and Kevin were on the same page. Kevin looked at Jonny and Jonny back at him, brow knitted in solemn solidarity, and Jonny nodded affirmative at Kevin, because Jonny thought that was what he was supposed to do.

After that, Kevin and Jonny walked back to the Cul-de-Sac around the Lane, and Kevin scraped Jonny off when he went home. He watched Jonny walk sadly back across the street, Plank in hand, before heading through his house, grabbing his bike from the garage. He headed out the back, skewing the loose board in the wooden fence separating his house from the Lane, and he went out on a joy ride to calm his nerves.

He rode through the construction site, saw one of the skeletal house frames had collapsed in the earthquake, the other frail with damage. He rode past the Park N' Flush, which seemed to be living life business as usual. At Kevin's distance, he couldn't see much in the way of damage like he'd seen with the houses on the Cul-de-Sac. Maybe mobile homes were better protected from shifting tectonic plates. Like Peach Creek was close to a tectonic plate anyways.

Past the trailer park, Kevin, out of curiosity, rode his baby over to Peach Creek Jr. High, where he found the bleachers at the football field partially collapsed, which sucked. Most of the school's windows were busted out. Kevin biked the perimeter of the school and found no cars, so he gently hid his bike in the bushes, knocked the glass out of one of the busted windows and climbed inside. He wandered around the school's dark halls alone, his footsteps the only ones echoing up and down the length of the corridors. It was strange being the only one in the school. He was so used to it being full up of loud kids and other losers his age.

He left pretty quickly. It was creepy being there alone. Not because of the usual fear he thought would send him running from places like that, the one that took his echoing footsteps and made him ask himself whether or not the more distant echoes were even his, if there was someone else in there with him, if he was in serious danger. No. He was afraid because walking around the school with it empty as it was really drove home the idea of End of the World. Like he was the last man on Earth. It was terrifying. Creepifying. For how much he thought the other kids on the block were morons, jerk-offs, or losers, he was terrified of losing them and being totally and completely alone.

He took his bike and rode around the neighborhood some more, then took it by Main Street Peach Creek and looked for Nazz. He couldn't find her or she wasn't there. He looked off toward the highway, which lead to the city, and the hair stood up on the back of his neck.

He rode back to the Cul-de-Sac, ignoring the abrasive shouts of a burly man on Main Street trying to get him to stop, and speeding up at the sound of a gunshot behind him that echoed across Peach Creek. Riding past the woods, he looked over through the treeline and saw a figure among the trees, which startled him until he realized it was just Jonny, looking as sad and lonely as always.

Kevin put his bike up in the garage, locked it up to his dad's maintenance table, and went on a long walk again, kind of looking for Jonny, kind of wanting to be alone. He wandered out past the barren bed of the creek, past the back of the Park N' Flush, and over to the fissure in the woods, from which wavered heat mirages that rippled across the woods beyond, warping their forms into twisted shapes.

Kevin sat as close as he dared get, and he listened to the scraping making its way up toward him from the glowing hellish pit. Dread worked its way up from his stomach, hot and acidic, into his throat and he threw up in the tarnished soil next to the fissure, and he just couldn't get the image of Jonny's face looking at him from the woods out of his head.

Soon it was dusk, and Marie Kanker was masturbating with the jet blast of her bath's detachable shower head when she heard screaming outside her and her sisters' trailer at the Park N' Flush. She could have been mistaken, but she could've sworn it was that twerp Oscar from a couple trailers down, the forty-year-old jerk-off who grabbed her tit that once time when she was hanging up the laundry outside.

She was up and out of the bath before much longer, wrapped up in a towel moments later, leaving the jetting shower head to blast its spray into the bubbles of the bath. As she hurried out to join her sisters, the shower head floated around, and its jet blast started spraying out across the room.

"What's the big idea?" she demanded, heading down the stairs to join May, who'd been sitting on the ratty old couch, reading a monster comic book, but was now leering out the window into the trailer park beyond. "Is that that loser Oscar doin' all that yellin'?"

Lee joined them from the kitchen, gnawing on a strip of fish from the mom's leftovers in the fridge.

"There's somethin' out there, girls," May whispered to her sisters. "There's somethin' in ole Mammy's house."

The piled up to the window behind the couch, out to the golden light of the late afternoon. They looked out toward the trailer facing theirs, at the door that used to bar the bugs from crawlin' up inside. But it wasn't there no more, and all they saw inside was the dark.

It was then that Oscar started screaming again, and May, Lee and Marie piled out of their house and followed the noises. They was big girls. They could take whatever old spook that was fuckin' with that Oscar jerk-off.

A moment later, they saw the result of Oscar's screams as he came stumbling around the side of his trailer, clutching his mangled fingers, his jaw dripping blood from the claw mark splitting his face into quarters. May screamed and Lee clamped a hand over her mouth.

But it was too late. There was thudding around in ole Mammy's trailer, and the wall of the Airstream tore open and Hell poured out at the sisters, who joined May in screaming.

Double Dee, good ol' pure-of-heart Double Dee had convinced Eddy to go through with visiting Ed. Eddy was still nervous, Double Dee still weak and wobbly, but they made it up the stairs, maneuvering around the nasally tones of Ray Romano's voice in the living room. Ed met them at the top of the stairs with a big, goofy grin that made Eddy feel alright, if only for the briefest of moments. He grabbed them both up in a big bear hug, which made Eddy feel better. They went and said hi to Ed's sickly mom, who only looked more sickly and smelt more of shit, which made Eddy feel worse, and she shooed Ed away to take his friends down to his room to hang out. Sweet lady, Ed's mom.

Ed was all too happy to comply. They went down and watched TV for a while. Watched the news, which made everyone feel worse, except maybe Ed, who was just confused. Double Dee and Eddy watched the television tell tales of nightmarish human suffering. A woman got trapped under rubble in her apartment building in the city and they had to saw her leg off to save her. A man's dogs were killed when his house collapsed in Lemon Brook. Nobody's homes were fortified for earthquakes out here, experts said. There aren't supposed to be earthquakes in Peach Creek.

After a couple hours, they heard the screaming. They climbed out the basement window and stood out in the street, listening to the screams coming from the trailer park. It was the kind that sent shivers up the Eds' spines. Kanker noises. There were others too, screaming. Men and women. Unfamiliar voices. Soon, the Eds weren't the only ones out in the street. Sarah came out, Jonny limping with her on his crutches, Rolf and Friedbjorn, and Ed's dad came out too before they heard another scream from closer by.

Eddy knew the voice immediately. They all did. It was Jonny. Eddy wondered if Kevin had found him. He wondered if the melonhead had just fallen down the fissure. Everyone was quiet for a moment, even Mr. Rolf's Dad, who usually was not, and all turned their heads to the noise.

The loud BOOM of a shotgun blast echoed across the valley like thunder. BOOM, another.

The boys, girls, and men stood in silence, waiting for another sound. "Rolf, fetch me the elephant gun from the sunroom!" snapped Friedbjorn. Rolf replied quickly with a " _Yes, Papa!"_ and he tore off to the house.

Eddy and the others watched as Kevin came running in from beyond the Cul-de-Sac, running full-tilt, full-adrenaline mode, not looking at the others as he ran across the yards and rammed into his own house.

The others stood in confusion. Kevin came out again wielding his trusty baseball bat in both hands and he came running out into the street.

Behind Eddy, he could hear, "Papa! The rifle for you!"

But Friedbjorn was not listening; he was watching as Kevin went running back around out from the street, baseball bat in hand. Offended at Kevin's masculinity, Freddie ran to catch up with the boy.

Eddy, Sarah, and Ed went running after Freddie and after Kevin. Kevin peeled off down the lane. It was getting dark outside, the shadows were growing long, and the lane was capped in darkness from hanging trees. Kevin skidded to a stop, waiting.

The others stood, waiting. Rolf's dad did not. He saw Kevin stop, then turned and bounded back toward the cul-de-sac to get the elephant gun off Rolf.

Eddy was distracted by this when he heard Kevin shout, " _Oh shit!_ " and he whipped his head back around to see a man, although it was hard to make out in the gathering darkness, and at the distance, a man fully cloaked in shadow, come running from out of the shadows of the woods beyond the Lane, straight at Kevin. Eddy thought the guy had freakishly big ears at first, which was strange. He didn't realize what they really were until later.

Kevin was running backwards away from the shadowy thing, no, not shadowy, Eddy realized, but pure, sleek black in color. Kevin was trying to turn around and keep an eye on the thing at the same time as it came rushing toward him. Kevin swung at the matte black creature and it swung its arm at him, shattering the bat and ripping bloody claw marks down Kevin's chest as he fell, backwards, onto his ass.

Eddy saw the thing look up at him, at all of them, with glowing red eyes, and saw it suddenly turn and run straight through the fence, tearing it to shreds as it went. Eddy and the others ran down the road, back to the Cul-de-Sac, to follow the thing as it was going.

Rolf and his dad were in the middle of the street, Friedbjorn in possession of the elephant gun with Rolf helping him load it, swearing up a storm in whatever language was their native tongue. When Eddy made it to the street, he couldn't see the black thing anymore.

Then it threw itself out the front bay window of Kevin's house and landed in the grass with all the shattered glass, didn't even slow down and kept running, running straight at Rolf and his father (and Jimmy, who was slowly making his way across the cul-de-sac on his crutches).

The two men ran backward from the creature (Jimmy fell over) and Friedbjorn dragged the gun along the asphalt as he went, and just as the creature was turning out of their way, Freddie swung the gun up and aimed the elephant gun at it and fired, tearing it off its feet and sending it hard onto the pavement, smoke rising off its chest.

The creature slid to a stop and laid there. Rolf and his father and the others, including Eddy but not including Jimmy, who laid on Kevin's yard crying out for Sarah, began to walk toward the prone creature. Sarah cut away from the others and went to help Jimmy.

Eddy saw that those weren't ears. They were huge, curved horns ending in pin-prick points.

Freddie reloaded the elephant gun, handed it off to Rolf himself. Rolf aimed unsteadily at the creature, eyes wide and wild in fear. His arms shook. Freddie pulled out a large hunting knife from his belt and continued toward the creature. Slowly. Steadily.

Freddie was up on it, ready to cut its throat when it roared back to life, showing huge yellow, pointed teeth that chomped and hungered, snapping at Freddie and sending its long talons up into the father's overhanging gut, lifting him up off the ground as it rose to its feet, and Eddy swore it sounded just like fabric tearing listening to the creature rip up Freddie's insides. It tore him up just enough to put him down and then it was off again, but Rolf finally pulled off a shot at it, knocking it halfway over, off its balance, continued running until -

\- Ed came running at it and slammed into the creature with all his strength, knocking the creature down onto the asphalt facedown. It was flailing and growling and roaring as Ed held it down. It warbled incomprehensible language and screamed and screamed. Its voice was like metal scraping metal, like a percussion instrument had learned to speak like a man, its tone and pitch rising, falling, twisting and turning as if cycling through different, disparate voices, some low and baritone, others higher and ear-piercing.

Rolf dropped the gun and went to his father's side. "Papa!"

Eddy decided it was up to him now and ran into Double Dee's house to some duct tape, which was the obvious thing to look for.

He tore through enough things to hurt Double Dee's feelings, but finally he found it, and he came running out again and began pulling off strips. Double Dee was huffing at the door when Eddy came running out of it.

The creature was still pinned under Ed's weight but was clawing at him, still shrieking its angry, impossible language, and had gotten a few good hits here and there on his legs and forearms. Ed helped pulled the creature's arms together, careful of its talons, and held them as Eddy wrapped them in duct tape until he was out of the roll, then he ran back inside for more. Soon, Eddy and Ed had the creature's arms and legs bound.

Double Dee approached them, gaping down at the sleep black humanoid figure hog-tied on the asphalt. Some foreign, alien thing in the Cul-de-Sac.

Fascinating.

"My lord." The creature's hot red eyes turned to look Double Dee in his and Double Dee stepped back in tentative fright, staring at it as Eddy and Ed hung over its powerful, bucking body, huffing and puffing. Double Dee struggled to speak and failed to make his throat croak words at first.

Then, he said, "Quick. Let's get it to my house, shall we?" Eddy sneered at him.

"No!" Rolf shouted. He rose from his father's side and approached the beast with the elephant gun. He snapped it open and pulled forth the empty shell. Reached into his pocket to replace it.

"No, Rolf!" shouted Double Dee in a panic, but it was too late. Rolf snapped the gun shut, took aim, and fired the shell directly at the black beast's head. But nothing happened but ricochet.

Kevin clambered up to his feet. "What the fuck?" he wondered aloud.

The three Eds watched Rolf pick his father up, wrap an arm around himself, and help the dying man back to their suburban farmhouse. Rolf spoke lyrically in his native tongue to his moaning father as blood poured readily from his opened gut, splattering the asphalt like the pitter-patter of heavy rain. Ed was the first to realize; Rolf was singing to his father.

Then, when Rolf and his father were inside their house with their door shut, they turned to Sarah, who nursed an injured Jimmy as Kevin came through the hole in the fence, looking at the massive hole torn in the back wall of his house. "What the fuck?" He walked through the path the beast took through his home, passing through new thresholds where walls used to be, and soon he was in the street with the others, watching Jimmy cry.

"What the fuck?"

Kevin looked up across the street to see Ed, Edd, n' Eddy hoist the sleek black beast up between them and carry it toward Double Dee's house. "What the fuck?'

And Nazz took precisely the wrong moment to walk back into the Cul-de-Sac. "What the fuck?" Kevin wondered one last time as a concerned Nazz approached him. "Kevin? What happened, dude?" she asked, terrified.

"I don't think everything's gonna be okay, Nazz. Call it a hunch, but I don't think it's all gonna be alright."


	3. Act 0: Day 4

Day 4

The Kanker sisters, their mother in tow, had packed up the trailer, yanked out the cinder blocks, and cranked up the Chevy by 11:30 at night, and by 12:13 in the morning, they'd convinced Mom to come along and get the hell outta dodge.

Their Chevy, trailer fishtailing behind, tore past the Cul-de-Sac as Nazz inspected the new set of doorways punched through the walls of Kevin's house while Kevin gathered up all his father's guns from their strategic placements around the house, carefully laying them out across the kitchen island, table, and counters. Kevin's father had a pistol for every room in the house, and several in auxillary in the gun cabinet with his half dozen hunting rifles, four shotguns, and an AR-14 assault rifle, along with a small machine gun Kevin suspected to be an Uzi hidden in a money box under the bed in the master bedroom.

Nazz floated between the decimated rooms of the house, back and forth from them to Kevin's feverish compiling of weapons.

She walked to the gaping hole where bay window used to be as Kevin felt his dad's recliner up and down, around the back, and, popping the foot stand out, underneath. Nazz nodded across the street to Double Dee's house. "Sooooo...Double Dee's got a demon stashed in his house?"

Kevin looked up, irritated, and snapped, "What?"

Nazz stared at him for a moment. Kevin sighed in annoyance and went back to groping the recliner. Nazz's heart throbbed in her throat. Her heart rate had been up, and pounding, all day. "Are you okay, dude? It looks like you need some medical attention."

"You know what happened, Nazz? Do you know what just happened? A demon climbed out of one of the holes in the ground out there, almost took my head off, and it did this." He stood, turned and held his shirt up to show Nazz the set of gashes across his stomach.

"Dude...Dude. Dude." Nazz tried to say something else, but that was all that would come out.

"How else do you explain it? How do you explain it, Nazz?"

"You're in bad shape, Kevin. Sit down, alright? Can't all this firepower stuff just wait till tomorrow?"

"It's today, Nazz. It's past midnight." Kevin realized how short of breath he was, and decided to splay out in the recliner while his dad wasn't there. He supposed Nazz was right. He could compile the guns after some rest in the morning.

"Are you done?"

Kevin looked around, thought a minute. He had nothing left to do that couldn't wait. "I guess."

"Let me put something on that, okay, dude?" Her voice softened as she grew closer. Kevin nodded "okay." "Very cool. Um. Do you know if you guys have hydrogen peroxide here?"

"No. I don't know," Kevin huffed.

"That's totally okay. Um. Alright. I know where my parents keep it, so I'm gonna go by my house and grab some, and you just stick tight right here, okay, Kev?"

"Okay." Splayed out in the recliner, Kevin began to realize how tired he was. It had been a busy day, just like yesterday. Taxing. He figured it would probably only get worse and worse, each day harder and harder. No wonder Jimmy's parents couldn't take it. Kevin's heart dropped. He hadn't considered them in a few hours. He hadn't been thinking of what to do about it, how to tell the others. Kevin wondered where Jonny was. He'd heard the melonhead scream in the woods. He must have run into the demon too. Or one like it. They had to be coming out all over the goddamn place. Kevin wondered whether or not he was just tired from the day or from the blood loss from his chest wounds.

As Kevin was lost in thought, Nazz was looking him over, worrying, nervous, scared, the works. She figured he was out for the count, at least for a little while, so she walked past the torn out bay window and took the door instead. "I'll just be a few minutes, Kev. Just hang tight."

Kevin's mind was racing, darting from one thought system to the next. He considered the End of the World. When the door shut, he thought about Nazz. How much he wanted her to come back, so he didn't have to be all alone with people he didn't like, present company included. But she'd only be a minute. She was just going back to her house. Then Kevin remembered Rolf's dad's plans of plunder. He jumped up, bolted out the bay window, calling: "Nazz, wait, I gotta tell you something!"

Nazz walked into the mangled nightmare that was her kitchen as Ed dragged his parents' old dog cage across the Cul-de-Sac to Double Dee's, where Double Dee and Eddy kept watch over the bound demon as it screamed epithets at them in its grotesque language. Since they'd carried it inside, they had compounded the duct tape binding the beast with whatever lengths of chain and rope the three Eds could find lying around the respective houses, locking the chain with padlocks from Double Dee's collection.

Eddy watched Double Dee watch the strange black thing with its pure-red eyes. He watched the thing with fascination and curiosity. Double Dee could feel Eddy's eyes burning holes in the side of his head, felt it about it harshly as the demon's seemingly literal piercing gaze. Double Dee had to admit, any time it made eye contact with him, a ripple of dread rolled across his very being.

Double Dee called a recess in the kitchen, the beast's cries dulled through the wall of the garage. "So we're calling it a demon, yes? That _is_ what we're going with on this?"

"Yeah…" Eddy mumbled, "I mean, look at it, Double Dee. It's got antelope ears, it's got the eyes a' fire, it's got fucked-up teeth even for you, sockhead, and whadda ya bet it came clawing its way outta one a' those fissures out there. For cryin' out loud, Double Dee, just listen to the thing. That ain't nothin' for human ears, I'm tellin' ya."

"Do you really think we've discovered the truth behind the theism argument, Eddy? We've proved the existence of at least some sort of supernatural force above us? I think we'll have to put that to the test, Eddy."

"How'd ya figure?" grumbled Eddy.

Double Dee thought for a moment. "Well, first things first, I suppose I'd best go ahead and find out what language it's speaking. That is, if it's anything known to human ears, to quote yourself, Eddy."

"You're off-world, Double Dee. You're gonna try and translate that shit it's sayin'? It's all just pops and clicks. I think our best bet is try and figure out how ta 86 the damned thing."

"I think Rolf's attempts earlier tonight were proof enough that in the area of mortal combat, we'd all be bested, don't you agree?"

"Not if we nuke the damn thing."

"Come on, Eddy. At the very least, it's something to keep our minds off of things till the world gets a hold of itself, isn't it? It's better than just sitting and moping around, yes?"

Eddy gave it a moment's thought even as he shook his head, Double Dee could see. It was always a delicious, especially rare occasion to beat Eddy at his own game, that game of course being the spoken word.

Before Eddy could come up with a dissenting statement, the two boys heard Ed banging on the garage door from the outside. From the weight of the thuds, it sounded like Ed was launching his whole body at the door, which was not outside the realm of possibility. He called through the door, "Mail for you!"

Double Dee sauntered back into the garage, knowing he'd beaten Eddy, and called through the door to Ed, "It's open, Ed!"

With the power out, Double Dee could not press the button on the wall to activate the electric retractor on the garage ceiling, but Ed seemed satisfied with lifting the garage door with one hand and sliding the dog kennel through, then walking under and letting the door fall shut behind him.

Double Dee and Eddy helped Ed where they could as he hauled the hog-tied demon into the kennel and locked it inside with the last padlock, which they'd saved for the cage.

Eddy curled up on the couch a half an hour later after growing bored with Double Dee's research and quickly passed out, snoring and drooling all over the furniture as Double Dee and Ed watched the hateful beast through the bars of the cage. It seemed so much smaller, packed undoubtedly uncomfortably into the small kennel on the floor of the garage. But any time they would care to glance into one of its two glowing red eyes, they would be quickly reminded of the respect and fear it commanded of them, even locked up and humiliated in a dog kennel. Especially then, probably. They were certain to remember the danger it posed to them and their friends should it ever escape, and they were sure to never grow too comfortable of the demon outta Hell in their midst, although both boys suffered the bad habits of letting their guards down perhaps too much, Ed at the cool factor of the thing in all its four-color comic book beauty, and Double Dee at its incredulous impossibility. But neither boy was distracted fully enough to forget to be in part terrified of the thing with its razor sharp claws, razor sharp teeth, and razor sharp horns. Most of the thing was, in fact, razor sharp, as Ed had been so unfortunate to find out quite firsthand.

Not an hour later they were graced with a knock at the door from none other than Nazz. A surprise, to say the least, as the night grew ever closer to its wee morning hours, Double Dee noted with a glance at his watch. But Nazz carried with her at that moment none of her calm laid-back demeanor. Her shoulders were high and tight, like a cat on guard, her face grim and tired from a long day. Double Dee had forgotten to be tired in all the excitement. Nazz seemed to have no time for pleasantries even as Double Dee offered them to her as he stepped aside to let her into his house. She stepped inside and faced the room as Double Dee turned to lock and bolt the front door, and she only turned when he turned the deadbolt, and she said, inches from Double Dee's face, a hand on his chest, "I want to see it."

Double Dee was filled with a sudden anxiety and fear. "You want to see…" He couldn't manage the end of the sentence before Nazz interjected with: "The demon."

Double Dee let her to the garage, where Ed dangled over Double Dee's father's excess swivel chair, limp and snoring, as dead to the world as usual but with his eyes closed.

Double Dee walked ahead of Nazz and expected to know she'd caught sight of the demon when she'd let out a stifled noise of fear, but that muffled shout never came. Double Dee feared for a moment she overlooked the thing; after all, it was low to the ground, and one would not expect to find a demon locked in a dog kennel. But after a few moments of silence, Double Dee knew she must have seen it, and after another few moments he turned to look at her.

Her expression attempted to be stern and cool, detached and strong, but a nervous swallow gave her away. Not that it made her seem weak, not at all. No one could avoid fear looking into that thing's eyes in the low light of the garage, the glowing red seeming to waft off the eyes like a car's tail lights in fog. "Do you think it's smart to keep it caged like that?" she asked, and suddenly Double Dee felt quite afraid. "Don't you think you'll make it angry?"

Double Dee thought a moment. "Nazz, I believe the time has come and gone to avoid that."

Nazz nodded. "Thank you, Double Dee. Um. I just wanted to see it."

"Okay, Nazz. I'll show you out."

When Nazz walked out, she could hear a set of three bangs ricocheting across the yard from the next yard over as Kevin rapped at Rolf's front door. He had been trying to get Rolf to answer since she'd left him. He'd thought he'd slipped out while Nazz wasn't looking but he was never the light-on-his-feet type. Not to mention how loud the broken glass crackled under his feet as he climbed out his bay window.

"Dude," she called softly across the hedge. Kevin looked up at her. "Let's go, okay?"

Kevin took one last look at the door and nodded grimly at her. It was too late for everyone to be up anyways. But Kevin knew he wouldn't be getting much sleep. There were many more long days to come.

As Kevin and Nazz walked away, rubbing shoulders, Rolf sat on the other side of the living room wall of his home, watching his father take each and every one of his final set of breaths. He had not spoken in hours, and he was far from the lively, if angry, man he had been in the sunshine.

Friedbjorn had bled all over the plastic-wrapped couch, blood pooling among the translucent folds of the covering. Freddie was pale, his eyes lackadaisical, lids hooded, breathing slow and labored. He gazed at the ceiling like his night's dreams were projected onto it, and he was watching them, half-aware, half-receptive, run by him at a sterile distance, growing further and further away as he seemed to slip from his own vision, sinking down into his brain like it was deflating, or like he was drowning in quicksand and moving just as sluggishly, and he left his eyesight behind as he slipped away.

Rolf tended to his nearly dead father. He had attempted to strap Friedbjorn's stomach back in with a roll of tin foil and a length of rope, but they just poured out onto his hands around the binds of the rope. Rolf knew how warm his father's insides were. How hot his blood was while alive. But Friedbjorn was hardly alive by midnight, and by two AM, three minutes after Kevin's fist had last rapped on his front door, Rolf's father was dead.

Rolf tended to him for several minutes more, even knowing he was dead. He sat by his father's side and looked down at his father's eyes as they stared blankly at the ceiling, jaw slightly slack, lips slightly turned upward. It was as if he'd seen an angel and not a demon that night. Perhaps, Rolf hoped in the more childish corners of his aged mind, he had. But Rolf did not believe in such things.

After taking the time to accept his father was dead, he wrapped the slipcover on the couch around his father's body, tied it with lengths of rope from the farm out back, went back outside and slept with Wilfred in the yard till the wee hours of the morning, as the cool gray light flooded the darkness through clouds. Rolf suspected from the humidity, the wind, the sky, that it would rain that day. And it would several hours later, as Rolf began work on his father's grave among the pig troughs, softening the soil. Good for digging.

The rainfall on the roof of his house shook Kevin awake, and he sat up in the recliner, trying to remember when he'd fallen asleep. Nazz laid nearby on the couch, still asleep. She had always been one for rain.

The first kid Kevin met on the Cul-de-Sac, when his parents had moved them there to relocate for his father's new job at the jawbreaker factory, had been Nazz. They'd gone to same church, when both their sets of parents had gone to church. Both sets had since stopped. It took Kevin's mom and dad till the divorce to stop going, although Kevin knew his father would slip out during the day to pray and cry at his old place of worship every once in a while. Kevin and Nazz's parents recognized each other in the pews one Sunday and set up a playdate between the two kids. Kevin hadn't been receptive, because fat people disgusted him when he was small and still did at teen age, but he quickly fell in love with Nazz after the second or third date.

Not like that. Not in love like 'in love' with Nazz. Ew. She used to be fat. And they were just friends.

It rained on that second or third date, and Kevin remembered how much Nazz loved the rain from that, although he suspected she didn't think he remembered. She loved it, told him so, and danced to its beat on the roof of her house. She had always been a free spirit like her parents. A hippie. What were they doing going to church?

But Kevin put the footrest down and set about to the day's work.

He turned and remembered with a start at the sight of it that a demon had blown through his house like a Mack truck last night and left a hole in his wall to the outside. Rain was flooding the carpet.

Kevin went out back and found a tarp, when to the garage and found a staple gun, and he woke Nazz up stapling the tarp to the hole in the wall. She sat up, groggy as all hell and irritable. Kevin told her the house was all hers and for breakfast and a shower, and she nodded and rubbed her head.

Kevin looked out the half-covered hole in the wall, out toward Jimmy's house, which he could just barely see at the very other end of the Cul-de-Sac, at the end of the roundabout.

He turned to Jonny's house and thought about Jonny for a minute before finishing covering the wall as he kept thinking about Jonny.

Kevin went to the kitchen and remembered he'd sat out all the guns in the house there late last night. What a strange place he'd been in then. To be fair, he'd just been attacked by a demon, which was something he didn't believe was real, or at least was something he thought he wouldn't encounter in a long, long time. Seemed like that fissure out in the woods was a portal to Hell. It was strange to Kevin how easy that was to believe in his head, that that crack in the ground ran straight down to Hell itself, which, he reminded himself, was something he didn't necessarily believe in either. What a world he lived in. What a world.

He ate breakfast alone until Nazz stepped up to the doorway halfway through his waffle. She told him she was going out again looking for her parents and there was nothing he could say to stop her. He wouldn't have dared try anyways and to prove it to her, as well as provide her with as much luck and good will as he could, he lent her his bike for the day, and he hand-cranked his garage door to lift it up, and watched Nazz mount his baby and ride it out of there. He went back to the kitchen and finished breakfast, then washed dishes around the same time Eddy woke up on Double Dee's couch, grumbling and trying to figure out just where the fuck he was.

He remembered after a moment, and then he felt like shit. He didn't try to go back to sleep, just got up and shuffled to the garage to see if the demon had broken out and killed Double Dee yet. All he found was Sockhead bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, humming as he worked to decypher the demon's language, flipping through one of his father's books on language, writing in his notebook intermittently. Eddy stood in the door, waiting for Double Dee to see him. After a while, he gave up and walked out again. Stood in Double Dee's house, looking at the cracked walls. Bored, he turned around and walked back into the garage.

"Where's Ed?" he asked, taking Double Dee off-guard, making him drop his pencil.

"Oh, Eddy," Double Dee sighed.

And the demon took this as its cue to start its round of foreign screaming for the day. Eddy's head hurt in the mornings, so he clamped his eyes shut, his hands over his ears, gritted his teeth and shouted, "Shut up, would ya? It's too early for this!"

Double Dee put in a pair of earplugs and said in a casual tone, "I sent Ed home early this morning, Eddy. He needed to have a real bed. And besides, he was worried sick about his mother."

Eddy grumbled in response and crossed his arms. "You got ones for me?" he grunted in regards to the earplugs.

He said it softly enough to Double Dee not to hear, but Double Dee smiled anyways and held up another pair on the workshop table. Eddy shuffled over, snatched them away, put them in and shuffled back into the house.

Jonny woke up to a knock at his door. He slipped into a shirt, grabbed up Plank from his own bed and headed downstairs. When he answered the door, nobody was there. But he did see Kevin walking back across the street from his house. "Hey, Kevin!" Jonny called, and Kevin looked back. Jonny waved and Kevin stomped back over. He approached Jonny, squinting at the sunshine even though it was overcast and raining. "You eat yet?" Kevin mumbled.

Jonny hadn't, so Kevin mumbled an invitation to his house and Jonny happily obliged.

Kevin walked Jonny back to his house. On the way. Kevin asked, "Was that you screamin' last night?"

Jonny chuckled shyly, rubbed the back of his neck and said, "Yeah. I saw something out in the woods."

"You saw the demon?'

Jonny stopped and looked at Kevin in the middle of the street.

"How'd you know that? That I saw a demon?"

"Because, woodboy, we all saw a demon last night."

"You're kidding."

"No. You said you saw it in the woods, right? That's about where I saw it last night, right beside the trailer park, right?"

Jonny frowned. "No," he said.

The two boys stood and thought in the road as Nazz watched from her living room window. She watched till Kevin and Jonny were out of view, waited around long enough for them to be back inside, then gathered up the bags she'd packed, slung them onto her back and headed out the back door. She strapped one bag to the bike rack and wore the other on her back. She was packed for an overnight trip. She mounted Kevin's bike and rode out the Cul-de-Sac for Main Street. She hadn't told Kevin, because he might not have let her gone willingly nor lent him the bike. She had only made the choice not to come back that night after he'd made the offer. She couldn't have made it far and back quickly enough without it. It was perfect.

She'd also slipped one of the pistols from Kevin's kitchen collection, and had it hidden in the pack slung across her back. She rode through the rain, picking up speed on the bike till the raindrops stung her face.

"Gee willikers, Plank, look at the arsonal!" Jonny cried at the sight of the assortment of firearms in Kevin's kitchen.

"Can't be too careful these days, Jonny boy," Kevin said, trying to sound cool. He made Jonny breakfast and they struggled to maintain conversation. At least, Jonny did. Kevin was content to a comfortable silence, but Jonny's fidgeting would allow that. Halfway through breakfast, Kevin noticed the gap in the pistol collection. He knew immediately where it had gone. With Nazz on her trip. He couldn't be too mad. She needed it. He only wished he'd offered it himself.

After eating, Kevin turned to Jonny with a grim look and said, "Do you want to come with me when I tell Jimmy about his mom and dad?"

Jonny gaped at Kevin for a minute. "Um" was all he could muster.

"Yes or no, Jonny, that's all I ask." Kevin stared at him and Jonny stared back, a deer in headlights.

"Do I gotta tell him?" Jonny managed.

"Not if you don't want to. Look, we can go over there, and whenever the situation calls for it, whoever's ready can tell him. Sound good, Jonny boy?"

"Um. We should pick who tells him. Cuz if neither of us decide which one tells what, then we might both get confused when we go over there because we'll both be thinking the other's gonna tell him, and then neither of us'll tell him, and then we'll both walk home wondering just what the hell happened."

"That won't happen, Jonny."

Jonny fidgeted with his plate, Plank diligently sitting at his side. "Yeah, I know," Jonny squeaked.

As Jonny and Kevin took the long walk down the Cul-de-Sac to Nazz's house, Rolf finished the grave he planned to bury his father in. He stabbed the shovel in a plot of earth, wiped the sweat/rain mixture on his brow, and walked back inside. His father was a huge man, and it took quite a bit of strength to drag him through the house, out back to the grave.

Rolf felt it was a disgrace to his father to drag him to carelessly through the house, and felt it would be even more so to just haphazardly knock him over into the hole, so he mustered up all the strength he had left, pulled more than a few muscles, but he hoisted his father up off the ground, up over his head, and then cast him down into the hole. He did it all right. He said a prayer for his father, then began filling the hole in.

After that, he sat in a slipcovered chair and rested. Then, he went out and fed the animals. And afterwards, he commenced to packing the house up.

Jimmy took it hard. Neither Kevin nor Jonny could blame the kid, really. Sarah sure couldn't. They would have felt the same way if they knew their parents had taken the easy way out. Sarah was angry right after they told Jimmy about his mom and dad, pissed that they had waited a whole day to do it, livid that that little freak 2x4 kid had the absolute nerve to bring his goddamned hunk a' wood along for the ride, but that all fell to the wayside for her poor baby Jimmy.

Jimmy cried at first, which Kevin, Jonny and Sarah decided was markedly better than what he did after that. But before he stopped sobbing into Sarah's blouse, pressing his brace ring into Sarah's stomach, which hurt, but she couldn't just tell him that, could she?

And before he fell silent in bed, he told Sarah, and Kevin and Jonny overheard, which was unfortunate, what poor Jimmy had to say. He told Sarah how he'd ended up hurt that day of the earthquake.

He didn't remember. But that was the horrible thing, because he could always remember. He figured he'd just been asleep, or at least half-asleep when it happened, but now he knew he'd just chosen somewhere deep down in his subconscious to ignore it all. See, the last thing he'd remembered was his parents, stiff and crying, plucking him up out of bed during the world-shaking earthquake. Then, all he knew was he was on the ground under his bedroom window, and he thought he was dying he was in so much pain. His parents, he figured, had thrown him out the upstairs window. They'd tried to kill their only son in the world. Now, what kind of parents were thoses, anyhow?

Jonny was catatonic after that revelation. Not a word in the world could shake him out of his trance. Sarah found a hole to crawl into after Kevin and Jonny left and curled up in it, and racked with sobs till she was bone dry inside and her throat hurt from it all.

Later, Kevin tried to see Rolf again. But again, he would not answer the front door. At least this time, it was not willful on Rolf's part. He was just in the middle of packing the upstairs, too far from the door to hear the raps on its surface.

On his way home, Kevin's mind was racing. Rolf's father must have been dead by now, or as good as, as far as he knew from the descriptions of the others last night. He thought about Rolf and he thought about Jimmy. He thought about Jimmy's parents. What made them do something like that? The day of the earthquake, they killed themselves. What could have driven them to do something like that? Had another demon dig its way out, and they caught a glimpse of it Bigfoot-style crossing the Cul-de-Sac that day? Or had they figured something was going on, something Kevin, Jimmy, Sarah, nobody else knew about? It killed Kevin that he'd never know what they were thinking the moment before they threw Jimmy out that window.

There were less people out that day, according to Nazz's approximation of Peach Creek as she rode past the "Now Leaving" sign and past the fissure she'd found had opened up parallel to the white lines on the highway, effectively chopping the strip of asphalt in half, the heat rising off it all but singing her right side as she rode alongside it. Likewise, there was next to nobody on the highway leading to the city. She'd pass the odd car tearing ass down the oncoming lane and the odd truck coming up from behind, riding slow as slow could be, probably taking in all the damage. If she saw someone else on foot on her way, she was sure to veer quick to the side to avoid them, whether or not they were hurt or scared or young or old, whether they were calling to her or not. She heard gunshots, screams, blood curdling screams, police sirens, and every other kind of siren known to man when she crossed the bridge into the city.

The destruction she saw on her ride was immense. The Peach Creek Fire Department, which she saw scattered in several areas, had an impossible task on their hands. Several homes, Nazz saw, had completely collapsed. The Crawdad Hut had collapsed as well, and Lih's Supply Company was smoldering from aftermath of a fire. Nazz could see several pillars of jet black smoke rising on the horizon, which could only mean there were dozens more fires across the county, and definitely more across the country. No wonder the government had not stepped in to their aid. They must have had much bigger fish to fry. She remembered watching the news on the day of the earthquake before the power went out and saw several nuclear reactors up north and west were on the brink of failure. The earthquakes had shaken several volcanoes awake, with several lucky world-ender exceptions, newscasters had gasped thankfully. Peach Creek, Lemon Brook, everybody was on their own for a while. That was if the government ever did come to their aid, if it was still in good standing after this. It might take months to get help at this rate if at all. And after that, it would take years to repair all the damages. And what about those glowing fissures? Peach Creek wasn't the only town in America with those cracking open all over the place. They were about as frequent as destroyed houses.

She was afraid to get too close to the hospital downtown or anywhere thereabouts. It would be crowded out there, and that meant interactions with people she could not avoid. That terrified her as it seemed more and more with each passing day that law was failing, and the country was collapsing. Who knew what the odd passerby on the street thought of her as she rode past? Did they see a pretty girl they could dig they fingers and way worse than that into? A girl with two big, overflowing bags full of god-knows-what valuables and the like? A victim? A warm body? A jewelry stand? Nazz was terrified of people when they weren't for sure bound to the rules of the law.

But she couldn't avoid downtown. She couldn't just ignore the hospital. That area drew people. She had a better shot of finding her parents and Jonny's parents out there. The more people there were, the better her chances. If they thought like her, took the road less travelled by, she would be screwed. But she had to make a decision.

So she made the hard one and banked toward the tallest buildings in the city. She followed the street signs from there.

She rode fast through the downtown streets where she could. In many places, pieces of the surrounding buildings had broken off and shattered on the roads. Broken glass littered the ground in most spots like snow in early winter. Nazz had to be careful with Kevin's bike through here. She passed dozens and dozens of people. Most were calm and huddled together in makeshift tent cities in the streets where the buildings seemed to dangerous to take refuge in, or were closed to the public. Cops guarded many large buildings with their front windows blown out. They were protecting company assets instead of going through rubble to save lives. Some people were still crying and screaming, although in most areas Nazz couldn't see who was screaming. Many people she rode past were injured. She saw a woman being held down by what Nazz could only hope was her family as her forehead jetting blood down her face and into her gaping mouth, which hung in an expression of horror and shock, her limbs tense and muscles tight like she was all cramped up. Cars slowly made their way through packs of people in the street. Some were civilian vehicles, others police, ambulances, fire trucks. Nazz saw a SWAT van down a perpendicular street with all its doors open and its siren going off. She heard gunshots sometimes.

Nazz, against every fiber of her being, rode past each gathering of people slowly, sure to check every face in the crowds for her parents or Jonny's parents. She saw a couple people she thought was someone she knew, but upon closer inspections, however close Nazz dared stray, she found the people strangers.

One tall building of maybe fifteen stories poured black smoke from an upper set of windows. People stood around under it, discussing how close it was to falling. Nazz rode away. Why weren't they running, if they thought it was near collapse?

She overheard talk as she rode. Moaning voices telling infirmed family that help was coming, or grieving voices asking why this had happened and where the authorities were, why wasn't anybody helping them? They hadn't seen the extent of the damages. Hadn't seen the television since the earthquake or heard the radio. The didn't know the world was a hairpin away from ending as humanity knew and loved it. Some people she passed spoke like nothing was even happening. She passed the odd member of an outlying crowd that could laugh as others told stories or jokes. She guessed everybody dealt with these things differently, and she was thankful not everybody was hopeless. If you're laughing, you're not hopeless.

She couldn't even get close to the hospital through the emergency barricades and armed guards. The hospital, it seemed, was overflowing as it was and spilling over with injured men, women and children. Guards turned people away and some grew angry and violent. There were enraged screams from the front of the barricades. In front of Nazz, even as far from the hospital as she was, was a sea of injured. Brave doctors and nurses moved among the rows of injured and they were crowded around with desperate family members of the infirmed or the injured themselves begging for hasty assistance. There was only so much help to go around. It stank out there of sweat and shit and death. Several bodies in outlying rows reeked and were swarming with flies. Most of the bodies were covered with sheets of some kind, but it seemed people had grown too attached to their covers to lend them to the dead now. She watched a man pull a comforter blanket off a corpse, ball it up in his hands and walk away with it. It gave ideas to others surrounding and they too took sheets off the corpses.

Nazz needed to get off the bike and move among the people, look for her family. She couldn't leave the bike, so she walked with it next to her, clutching it close to herself and herself close to it to make her as small as possible to fit through the tight crowds. Most people made room for her, and some people asked if she needed help. She shook her head most of the time and got tired of it after a while, so she stopped responding until one worried man grabbed her and slung her around to face him, demanding to know if she was hurt or knew where her family was. She told her she was fine and needed to get home. She got on Kevin's bike and rode off as fast as she could. She couldn't find her parents or Jonny's out there at the hospital.

She rode out of the crowded downtown and rode around till she calmed down. When she did, she took the bike down street by street through the city, looking for anyone she knew. As she rode, she passed bodies of looters shot dead in the streets or slung over storefront windows, as well as the corpses of mugging victims, robbed for everything they carried, sometimes including their clothes. She rode by a block away from a gas station that had blown up, billowing smoke into the sky. Had to be bad for the ozone, all this catastrophe.

After an hour or so of aimless riding through streets, Nazz took a break at a quiet, derelict McDonald's, where she sat on an outdoor bench and ate the lunch she'd packed for herself, Kevin's pistol on her leg as she did. She heard something inside the playground out there with her, in the plastic tunnels above but didn't know if it was human or an animal. Cars rode by. She could tell she was close to the interstate because of how many drove past. That interstate must have been a nightmare. She would steer clear of it.

But it must have been packed. Maybe her mom and dad were there. But why would they be? As a matter of fact, why would they be anywhere out there, out in the city? Looking for help? It must have been apparent by now there was no help out there. Maybe they'd looked for help and ended up dead. She hadn't even checked the piles of bodies.

Nazz noticed that she hadn't found any more glowing fissures since she'd ridden past the one going out of Peach Creek. It seemed they were more rare than she realized, thankfully. That meant fewer holes to patch up to keep the demons from getting loose. Nazz laughed as though that. What an insane thought. "That meant fewer holes to patch up to keep the demons from getting loose." The whole thing was plum crazy. She sounded like a schizophrenic just trying to describe what was happening around her.

She rode back through the metropolitan area and searched the stacks of bodies in the streets for hide or hair of her parents, and found nothing and nobody she cared about. It was strange. After seeing a few bodies on the street, nearly gagging at the sight of those, she was tossing them aside like nothing, pushing them away like a minor inconvenience, and she hadn't given one thought to the limp faces on any of those bodies she rifled through, to the minds they'd held maybe even just a few hours ago, to what each body she touched and gave little though to meant to its family members who'd lost a beloved daughter, mother, father or son, aunt or uncle or nephew or cousin. Nazz suffered.

A few hours later came nightfall. Nazz became afraid to ride the streets especially with her bags of what would be audited upon sight as valuables and Kevin's beautiful, vintage bike that would no doubt fetch a pretty penny at any pawn shop it was brought to.

She found a patch of woods just outside the city, just a small island of trees sandwiches between two winding strips of asphalt, laid the bike out next to her and pulled out her sleeping bag. She didn't sleep for a few hours after she'd laid down, more uneasy with every passing car, passing pair of footsteps, or thought that came through her mind. She was afraid all the time now. She should never have left Peach Creek or the Cul-de-Sac she surmised around 10:30 that night, but an hour later she passed out and slept hard for the next seven hours.

Back in Peach Creek, Ed took care of his sickly mother in her bed, his father downstairs in the recliner, snoring through a generated-powered marathon of _Married with Children_ reruns, about as helpful as a loaf of bread in a hostage negotiation. Ed had been caught between two mind set all day. In one, he worried for his mother and increasingly depressed sister, especially now after Jimmy's apparent auto-vegetablization. His mother was growing sicker by the day and her health could be gauged and graphed by the rasp of her voice and the pallor of her skin, particularly on her face, where her cheeks never flushed. The other, Ed was hap, hap, happier than happy, his mind racing in a good way (compared to his other mindset) as he considered the possibilities that came from the mutant Hell beast Double Dee was keeping stashed in his garage. The only thing Ed could feel anything less than joyous about was that Double Dee was hogging the demon all to himself! They should set of time tables or something and share the horned Mephistopheles so Ed could get a turn enjoying its unknowable songs and lullabies. He was so excited when he thought about it, about what it might mean (if there was one, there had to be more, which was so cool! A hive of super-mutants living right under his feet in his very own township of Peach Creek!) and he thought he might literally explode. But he contained himself, just barely, but he did. He even managed not to go mouthing off about it to any of his family like Eddy warned him not to do. He had kept quiet all day! Eddy would be so proud. Ed was lying in his bed, just as sleepless as Nazz was a city over, his mind racing at the same time Nazz's was too, during which time Double Dee also had his wits about him, and had a sudden, delightful (well, if only in his own brain) realization.


	4. Act 0: Day 5

Day 5

 _Infernum resurget._

What a fool Double Dee found himself to be. _Infernum resurget_. Latin. The demon was speaking Latin. Why hadn't he thought of that earlier? It was the most logical possibility of them all. Demons spoke Latin. Everybody knew that. Double Dee had figured it was nothing more than the suggestion of mass media and pop culture that had incurred that assumption. So, being the presumption pompous know-it-all he knew everyone thought he was, and often proved himself to be, he had not even explored the option, even though had he even given it the first inkling of consideration, and had listened to its phrasing, perhaps it would have made itself clear earlier, and he would have gotten more sleep in the last 48 hours. But there was nothing he could do about all that now.

 _Inferum resurget._ At least, that was what Double Dee thought it had said. Double Dee supposed he couldn't really blame himself for his folly too heavily - Latin was a dead language, after all - one no one had ever heard spoken by an original native speaker. That was, until now. It didn't sound the way Double Dee imagined it in his head. The intonations and pronunciations were markedly different, if subtly and implacably so. But that was the way language changed over the centuries, he knew.

 _Infernum resurget_.

Double Dee was a bit of a pedestrian when it came to the language and its complexities. But from what Double Dee understood of the language, that little snippet he could decipher from the beast's embittered shrieking meant in, as far as Double Dee knew, in no uncertain terms _Hell is rising._ Or _Hell_ _rises_. But that was just semantics.

Double Dee gathered from the look in the beast's unblinking eyes that that was threat in no minced words. It glared at Double Dee the whole night long. If Double Dee hadn't known any better, he would have said the thing's gaze was affecting his mood and stomach - it would turn and twist in pain intermittently throughout the day and night.

The demon soliloquized at Double Dee in its furious tongue off and on throughout the night and day between lapses of either exhaustion, rest, or observation; perhaps it was waiting to lull Double Dee into a calm, then burst free when he had become distracted with another activity. Either way, it seemed to enjoy the moments it would burst back into soliloquy, often choosing them at what it seemed to surmise as Double Dee's most vulnerable moments, looking to jolt Double Dee with a sudden shock of piercing speech. It seemed to enjoy taunting him. Ever since Nazz had come to him last night to see the thing, he was sure to stay wary of the Hellbeast in his midst. He would not grow too careless with it, lest it come back to bite him, or dice him to bits with the talons adorning each of its cruel fingers. Double Dee chuckled to himself at the thought. How could fingers be cruel?

 _When you use them cruelly, my boy,_ he thought.

After he discovered it spoke Latin, he listened more carefully to its words. He could pick out certain words and phrases here and there. He heard the demon say " _mors certissima_ " which meant either "death is certain" or "certain death," Double Dee could not figure out which. He also made out the phrase " _Dies irae_ ," which he knew from the title of a favorite poem of his called "The Last Judgement." It would lapse into lyrical incantation, what Double Dee could only assume (but look where that had gotten him) was prayer, which would begin and end with " _Ave Satani_." Hail Satan. But of course. What else should he expect of a fallen angel, lackey of Lucifer himself? Double Dee shivered. The recitation of the Dark Lord's name by the demon brought the thought of, by proxy, the sheer tangibility of Satan at Double Dee's fingertips with one of his followers chordling cruelly at his feet, screaming at him in twisting intonations probably regarding its master Satan, the Hellfire below, and other such things it must have known quite intimately. One of the Hellbeast's favorite terms seemed to be " _abominamentum,_ " which pretty clearly translated to "abomination."

It was three in the morning, Double Dee realized. He needed some sleep.

And several hours later, Nazz woke up late enough into the morning to hate herself for it, if just a tiny bit. Raindrop in a flood, and all that stuff. She had woken up only just short of an hour before Ed had, which would have been depressing had she known he'd preceded her in tardiness.

She sat up and checked her bags on either side to make sure no one had some through in the night and robbed her blind. She rolled her sleeping bag up and packed it back up in one bag. In the other, she pulled a box of Moonpies and unwrapped one. Took a bottle of water from the same bag and had breakfast while she planned her day out.

Yesterday's travels had gotten her nowhere. So she figured she'd invest in a new plan of action, one she'd turned over in her head briefly last night but had not fully considered. But now, with no other ideas readily within the grasp of her half-sleeping mind, it became the de facto agenda of the day's search. She would ride across the city, to places she and her parents had gone when they'd been. Familiar gas stations. The Maltron office building downtown, where her father had had many meetings. The park. Then, worst for last (and pragmatism; it was all the way on the other side of the city), the Cherry Stem Shopping Pavilion.

Her schedule in some sort of order she slung her bags on the bike and her back respectively, walked the bike back out to the street and rode off in search of familiar places and mass graves at 9 in the morning, a short while before Ed let himself into Double Dee's house and shook Double Dee awake, and Double Dee let out a pathetic cry of distress and surprise before he realized it was Ed who had him, and not the coal-black beast locked in the dog kennel in the garage.

Ed seemed grim and it took Double Dee a moment's worth of collection of his surroundings to place the reason for his expression. There was someone else in the house with them.

An hour prior, when Ed woke up, he had not shaken the excitement from the previous day's adventures, and the prospect of a pet demon was still pinballing back in forth in his hollow skull. After checking up on Mom and finding she wanted nothing more of her son at that moment than a glass of water, Ed bounded down the stairs and hastily retrieved her request.

As he'd obtained the ingredients, he'd danced around the kitchen in a state of utter joy. He had always been a bit of a clutz, of course, so as he galloped around, he knocked into things and sent other things toppling to the floor. He picked up after himself, of course, because he was a good boy, but the loud bashing and clanging still attracted the attention of none other than his father, who stumbled into the kitchen in his boxers and black tank top. Ed had been dancing around with his back to the doorway, shaking his buttocks as he filled his glass with water, and as he turned he'd frozen, sloshing a bit of water onto the floor as he found himself face to face with the Man Who Never Moved, who had made a special exception this particular morning.

"What's got you all worked up?" the man asked, scratching his ass cheek under his boxers.

"Nothing," said Ed, nervous and sweating.

"Don't make me get worked up over this," the scraggly man said simply.

"I'm just happy, Dad," Ed said, approaching with the glass of water, all he had in the way of a humble offering for his father. "Like usual."

"Whatchu got to be so happy about?" Ed's dad scoffed bitterly, letting Ed past and up the stairs. Following behind him like a mean old dog chasing him home from school. "You livin' in full color, boy? Or are you that far gone?"

"Everything's ok, Dad." He turned to his father at the top of the stairs and smiled. His father didn't reciprocate.

"Everything's pretty fuckin' far from okay. It's a simple question. All it needs is a simple answer."

"Um...what question again?" Ed asked, biding his time. He rapped at his mom's door but his father flung it open before Mom had a chance to say anything. Ed waited till he heard her frail voice shake, "Come in, baby." And he did.

"What are you so happy for?"

Ed delivered the glass to his mom and looked at her, frightened. She smiled at Ed, then looked up at her husband. "That's just our son, dear. He's a little ray of sunshine."

Ed's dad stared at the two. "Alright." And he kept standing there, waiting for Ed. Ed put off leaving, sticking around to let his mother pet him and hug him, kiss him on the forehead "Have a great day, dear," she said.

And Ed approached the door, which his father filled even with his slim body and shoulders. Ed waited anxiously. Dad stepped aside and let Ed through. Ed walked down the hall, his father at his back. Ed always got jumpy when Dad walked behind him. He never knew what he'd do back there. Sometimes, he'd jab a finger in Ed's back till Ed snapped and got angry, then got in trouble for it. Sometimes, he'd get up close behind him and step on his heels just to be irritating. Sometimes, he'd put Ed in headlocks. He'd always wait to do anything, wait till Ed put his guard down, sometimes not even do anything at all, trying to play innocent, like he didn't follow behind Ed on purpose to make him anxious. Dad was like that. A real goof.

He followed Ed on his heels down the stairs, following him quick, stepping erratically, like he was trying to get a hold of Ed's heels but kept missing, and it made Ed jump with each step out of worry. "What?" Dad asked, innocuous.

"Nothing."

He kept doing it, gunning at his heels but always just missing. "What?"

"Nothing!" Ed shouted, annoyed. Dad's hands clasped his shirt by the shoulders and slung him around to the wall. Dad held him up against it with his hands, putting a knee in his thigh to make sure he kept still.

"It's not a hard question! But you won't answer it, will you? You gotta go run to your _mommy_ -" He sneered as he said the word _mommy_ , wheezing it in a high, nasal tone. "You're just a little _mommy_ 's boy. You won't answer your dad. You know what that tells me? Huh?" He shook Ed inquisitively. "You know what that tells me, huh, dummy? It tells me you got something to hide, something you don't want me to know about. You been a bad boy, Ed? Have you?" He brought his face close to Ed's, and Ed turned his head to avoid touching his nose with his father's, but Dad grabbed his face and turned it to face him again.

"No, Dad! I've been a good boy!"

"What did you do? Are you going to tell me what you did? Did you hurt somebody?"

"No, Dad! I didn't, I swear!"

"Then what. Did. You. Do. You'd better tell me right now, boy. What's got you jumpin' with joy?"

"Me and Eddy, and Double Dee -"

Dad shook him again, knocking the thought clean out of his head. "What? You and Eddy and Double Dee, what?"

"We caught somethin' in the Cul-de-Sac a few days ago. We got it locked up in Double Dee's basement."

"What is it?" Ed hesitated. Dad dug his fingers into Ed's shoulders. Ed squirmed, moaned softly, trying to worm out. "You catch a girl? Got a girl locked up and now your friends are takin' turns with her? Tha'd explain it!"

"No, Dad! No! We don't got a girl! We're not bad like that!"

"Then what?"

"We got a monster…" Ed mumbled.

"A what?" Dad asked incredulously.

"We caught a demon comin' outta the woods, from that glowin' hole thingy out past the trailer park, and me and Eddy and Double Dee -"

"Don't fucking lie to me! You're no good at it! You're too dumb for it! Don't you know Dad's got a mind like savant? Your dad's like a new-age Einstein compared to you!"

"I'm not lying! I _swear_ to it! I _swear_! I'll take you to it, promise! I'll bring you to see it, just please believe me!"

"You're lying."

"I'm not lying, Dad. I'm not a liar. I'm good. I swear."

"You got a demon in your loser friend's house?"

"No, the other one. Double Dee's house."

Dad's eyes darted around Ed's face, Ed's cheeks wet from a couple hot tears squeezing through. Then Dad grinned. "Alright, then. Take me to it. I want to see it."

They crossed the Cul-de-Sac in silence, Ed still walking ahead. His father on his heels the whole way. Ed rapped at Double Dee's door and waited. Double Dee didn't answer. He knocked again, and waited again. Dad started jabbing him in the ribs from behind. He wouldn't stop. Jab, jab, jab. " _Stop it_!" Ed cried in annoyance.

He dared look his father in the eye and was met with pure, unadulterated rage. Ed spun back around and banged, banged, banged at Double Dee's door, but there was no answer. Finally, he just turned the knob and let himself in.

His father followed him, right at his back, his hot, liquor-tainted breath wet on his neck. As soon as the door came open, Ed saw Double Dee there, passed out on the couch and hurried over to him as Dad figured the house out and strutted over to his approximation of where the garage should have been. He tried the knob but found it locked. "Is this it?" he asked as Ed shook Double Dee. "Ed."

Ed looked. "Yes, sir." Dad found it locked from the inside and twisted the bolt, and he let himself in as Ed finally got Double Dee to wake up. Double Dee shouted and awoke with wide, wild eyes that fell back to sedation at the sight of his buddy...then turned to concern at the sight of his distress. "Ed?"

"Double Dee!" Ed hissed under his breath and turned, moving out of Double Dee's way so he could see past to the door to the garage, which he'd locked in case the Hellbeast got frisky and let itself out of its bindings.

He saw Ed's father standing there, a step back from the door, the door itself flung wide open, Ed's dad's jaw slack and eyes wide in terror. " _Jesus_ ," he said. "What the hell is it?"

"Um," Double Dee began, "we've approximated that it's of an, erm, underworldly descent, Mr. Ed's Dad."

" _Jesus_ " was all Dad managed in response. " _Oh, gawd_. What the hell _is_ it?"

"It's a demon, Dad," Ed said softly.

Dad stared at it through the doorway, and Ed and Double Dee could hear the demon start up its screaming again, and Dad covered his ears with his palms and stepped back. "Ed…" he gasped, "Let's go, Ed."

Ed and Double Dee stared at him as he continued to stare at the demon as its diatribe grew louder and more furious. "ED! Let's _GO_!"

Ed hurried to join his father. Dad hurried out and took his son with him, and Ed pulled the door shut behind him, finally getting himself behind his father instead of in front, leaving Double Dee alone in the house as its only Earthly inhabitant, wondering just what he had witnessed transpire across from him.

Jonny and Plank woke up on his couch to a knock at his door. Jonny got up and approached it, hoping to find Kevin standing there, and when Plank peeked through the peephole and spoiled the surprise, Jonny wasn't disappointed. Kevin was waiting outside, leaning on the wall of the house with a leg crossed over the other, trying to look nonchalant and cool. It seemed like an unlikely friendship was blossoming! Jonny had never felt as close to another person as he did to Kevin these last few days. It was all incredibly exciting! His mom and dad would be so proud once they got back.

"Howdy, Kevin! What brings ya to these parts? You want some breakfast cereal with me and Plank?"

The absolute unfettered joy that cracked Jonny's voice as he spoke sent shivers of discomfort through Kevin's spine. "Uh, I already ate, woodboy. I was wondering if you wanted to help me out with somethin'."

"What, Kev?" Jonny asked, leaning in his doorway, crossing one leg over the other.

"I was gonna crank up my dad's truck, get some stuff together, and, you know, bury Jimmy's mom and dad."

Jonny's heart dropped. "Why?"

"Cuz they're stinkin' up the neighborhood out there, Jonny," Kevin said, and Jonny sensed some irritation in his voice.

"Shouldn't we wait till we got some adults around? They'll know what to do. Or we could try the police again, or, better yet, we could just go straight over to the Fire Department and ask them for some help. It's just right down past the school, there."

"Yeah, Jonny, I know where it is. But we're all adults here, ain't we? You don't think we can handle this ourselves? Besides, our parents get back or the cops show up, we just tell 'em why and where we did it, and they can cart 'em off the ol' mortuary themselves once it opens back up."

"I'm just saying. There's a lot more options here than do-it-yourself work."

"Jonny, I'm taking my truck, I'm taking some tools, I'm getting Jimmy's parents' bodies and I'm takin' 'em out to the Pit out back a' the school. Are you comin' with me, or what?"

Jonny nervously rubbed Plank's head with one hand and the back of his peach-fuzzed skull with the other. "I mean...I guess."

"How's this - I won't even make ya touch 'em." He made a hand motion that asked 'ya happy?'

Jonny rubbed his arm, looked around his living room and walked out, shutting the door behind him.

One lot over, Sarah sat at Jimmy's side, brushing his hair with her hand. He laid on his side with his back to Sarah, balled up in fetal position, staring in the middle distance. Sarah could him sniffle every once in a while. When she heard that, she would rub his cheek or arm and hum or sing to him. She always knew what to do when Jimmy was crying.

She heard someone come in below. She wondered who it was, but barely cared. She wondered if it was Nazz. Nazz hadn't come back last night, Sarah had noticed. Or if she had, she'd slept over at Kevin's again. Everybody was all redistributed throughout the Cul-de-Sac. Nobody stayed where they lived anymore, except Jonny, but that kid was a loon anyways, and her parents, who was half injured and half stupid, anyways, respectively, of course. She wondered what Nazz would do when she got back, seeing Jimmy like this. He couldn't take care of himself and never moved. He refused to eat or drink. Sarah had stepped out a few times during the day, granted, but when she was there, he never got up to pee or poop. He was just catatonic. She wondered how Nazz would feel. Wondered if she would kick them out. Enough was enough, time to give her her house back. It would be even worse if she brought her parents back with her. Then they'd definitely be rousted out. She'd have to bring Ed off taking care of Mom duty to come carry Jimmy back over to his house or theirs. Probably not theirs, not with Mom and Dad the way they were.

And for all intents and purposes, she was alone. Jimmy had always been the only one to make her happy and now all he was was a tear factory. He'd lie there and cry, and she'd sit there and cry and they'd all be crying.

She heard someone coming up the stairs now, and soon there was a knock at her door. "Come in," she squeaked, and Kevin peeked in, Jonny leering through behind him. "Yes?"

"Hey, uh, Sarah, we were wondering, does Jimmy wanna come see his parents before we, ya know...bury 'em?"

"No. He doesn't want to see them. Could you leave us alone, please?" she said, maybe too venomously. But Kevin just said 'okay' like he was pleased to serve and shut the door again. Sarah heard him talking with Jonny on the way back down the hall and the stairs. She heard the front door open and shut a moment later.

Jonny started sniffling and a moment later, Sarah started humming to him.

After a ways, Kevin and Jonny walked in silence out of the house. They walked to Kevin's house and gathered up the necessary tools and loaded them up in Kevin's dad's truck. After a decent while's awkward silence, Jonny said, "What's Nazz up to, Kev?"

"I don't know," Kevin spat bitterly. "She's off somewhere with my bike. She said she'd be back by last night and guess what, Jonny boy? She was a no-show."

"You think she's all right?"

"Yeah. I think she's all right. If I didn't, I wouldn't be so pissed off. I'd be out there too, lookin' all over for 'er. But you know what I think she's out there up to? Lookin' for you guys's parents. She's out there, where ever she is, hunting all over for 'em. And she's usin' _my bike_ to do it!"

"Oh" was all Jonny could think of to say.

"Yeah. And Rolf's locked himself up in his house, doin' God knows what in there, and he won't answer the door no matter how many goddamn times I go over there and knock on it! He won't answer the phone, not the landline in his house or the Jitterbug me and Nazz bought him for his weird fish-flogging manhood ceremony. It was his birthday party, for Pete's sake! But his weird-ass European-ass culture can't just call it that, nooooo, it has to go the way a' the Mexicans and their stupid quinceaneras and all that jazz, and it's all _really pissing me off!"_

It was then Jonny wondered if Kevin was a racist. Jonny thought quinceaneras were really cool actually. Jonny realized it wasn't the time when Kevin leaned against the side of the truck's bed and slid down it to sit on the driveway, leaned up against the tire. He even took his hat off and ran his fingers through his hair. Jonny noticed Kevin had very nice hair. He wondered if he moosed it or anything. It probably wasn't the time to ask him, though. Jonny just knelt next to Kevin and stared at him while he tried to figure out something to say. Kevin looked at him, and it was only then that Jonny realized the look on his face must have looked like he pitied Kevin, because Kevin's face turned to all muscles, and he shouted, "And what is it you're lookin' at, exactly!"

He grabbed Jonny's chin and turned his face to look away from him. Jonny ignored the directions, and looked at Kevin again. He extended his hand, paused, reconsidered this, then patted Kevin on the shoulder. "There, there, Kevin. Everything's going to be alright."

Kevin's lip was quivering but his face muscles were flexing really hard and trying to stop it and he blubbered: "It's just that I just, that I'm tired -" And Kevin couldn't hold it anymore and started crying and slobbering and all that ugly stuff Brad Pitt doesn't do in real life. Jonny knelt to his knees, put Plank facedown on the concrete and hugged Kevin. Kevin was clenched up tight between Jonny's arms and Jonny thought for a moment it felt just like when he was on that field trip and hugged the drug store Indian in Arizona, Kevin was so stiff. Then Kevin's muscles released all over, all at once, and it was like he had realized the floodgates and it all came pouring out. He was just a wet blob now of repressed emotions fighting desperately to pour out all at once, and his body could just barely handle it without literally exploding.

Kevin wrapped his arms around Jonny and Jonny thought he was reciprocating the hug, but Kevin locked his arms at Jonny's back and pulled, hauling himself to his feet and shuffling off to his house, still blubbering like a madman, becoming increasingly frustrated with the fact that Jonny would just not let him go, and he bucked and flailed suddenly, surprising Jonny, and shouting with a raspy, tearful voice, "Get the hell offa me!" But Jonny knew how to draw out a moment, so he didn't, and Kevin desperately pawed at the front door of his house for a few seconds before realizing he'd locked it, pulling out his keys and then suddenly giving up, shuffling over to his busted-out bay window, ripping the tarp off it and climbing inside, dragging Jonny the whole way.

Inside, away from prying eyes, Kevin didn't have to play the tough guy no more and he turned into Jonny's arms and brought his arms up under them and wrapped Jonny up again around his back, slinging his arms all around Jonny and squeezing and crying. Kevin had given in, and he let his forehead fall to Jonny's shoulder as he sobbed relentlessly. Jonny led them, shuffling, over to the couch, and they sat and Jonny held Kevin as he racked with sobs. "Let it all out, buddy," Jonny said, stroking the back of Kevin's head as Kevin quickly released one arm from hugging Jonny and pulled Jonny's hand away from his head, then going straight back to the hug.

After a few minutes of this, Kevin's faucet started drying up and he started calming down, and Jonny went and got him a tissue from the kitchen, carefully stepping over the arsenal laid out across it, and Kevin cleaned himself up in silence. He wished it had been Nazz or at least Sarah he'd cried to instead of Jonny, but begger's really couldn't be choosers, he knew, so he really had no choice (that didn't make him out as a real dickhead) but to embrace the situation. After a few more minutes, he worked up the confidence to speak again and not be embarrassed about the whole thing. "Thanks, Jonny boy."

"Yeah, no prob, Kev, you know, everybody's got some little emotional parts in 'em, and there's really nothin' wrong with just lettin' loose every now and again -"

"Jonny, you're ruining it. I'm tryna give you this."

"Oh, okay. I hear ya, Kev."

"And Jonny, if you do not stop calling me Kev, and don't start callin' me right, I'm gonna pound ya."

"Yeah, that's fair."

Ed's dad didn't say another word to him all day. He'd gone right back to being comatose in front of the TV. The generator cut off just before noon, but Ed didn't hear Dad go out and fix it. All he heard was silence.

Nazz arrived at the Maltron building downtown, one of the tallest buildings there, and the only one that, if you looked at it at just the right angle, it looked like an owl, with its twin pyramidal skylights on top, sloped summit and the pairs of round windows adorning all four sides of the building's upper floors. She'd loved it when they used to visit the building when she was small, when they had just moved to Peach Creek and her father needed to travel the short distance to the offices for the odd meeting or two.

It was located on a street with very few straggling victims of the earthquake, but that was probably just the financial district. She pulled up on the bike, climbed off and walked it over into the building with her. Its glass window front was busted out, allow easy access inside. The lobby was deserted, as she should have expected. A shattered chandelier sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded by an ring of glass shards spread out across the lobby. Nazz carried the bike to the front desk and hid it behind the counter, laying it on its side and locking it up to the desk's leg, which was bolted to the floor tiles. She slung the bag on her bag off and continued into the building.

The walls were marble and cracked enough to make Nazz nervous about going upstairs. There must have been some clever saying her dad had recited to her that spoke on the intellectual faculties one must lack in order to climb to the high floors of an unstable skyscraper. But she did it anyway, and had the foresight not to even try to use the elevators to do so. She beelined it for the stairwell, checking the map on the wall of all the floors and the businesses housed thereon, and cracked open the stairwell's heavy door, and gazed into the pure black within. She took out her flashlight and climbed. She hadn't thought ahead this much, having to climb fifteen floors worth of stairs. She climbed. And climbed. And climbed.

Took a break. And then climbed some more. sHe reached the fifteenth floor, where her dad's affiliate design company stored its offices and meeting space.

As she pushed the door open, she realized she had never actually once, in all the times they had travelled here for her dad's meetings, been to the floor he would be having them on. It was all too professional, too high-class or dangerous for a little ditzy blond girl. It was still dark. She shined the light around. She found herself in a corridor lined with large (broken) ceiling-to-floor windows with pairs of double doors in each of them. Lines of business storefronts, she realized. She found the design company stood directly across from the stairwell, much to her luck.

She flicked her flashlight off as she entered. Light flooded into the floor from the ceiling-to-floor windows. The natural light made up pretty adequately for the lack of power. There were dark corners, sure, and dark corridors to match them. All the windows had not busted out of the partitions up here, although they seemed to have at least partially busted out of the exterior windows, as a steady breeze rolled through up there and blew Nazz's hair.

She hoped she might find her parents here, or at least evidence that they had been here. The design company held important documents vital to her father's work, and she didn't see any reason he wouldn't be clamoring to come and get them before they fell into unwanted. Slimy hands of _other architects,_ and then he'd have lost the sense of originality to his buildings. And if there was something her father did not want, it was to lose to lose that flame of originality, that 'wow' and 'huh, I've never seen that before' factor in his work.

The curious girl she was, Nazz first approached one of the busted-out windows looking out over the city and peered out over the landscape.

Wow. Vertigo. She stepped back.

It was all the harrowing stuff she'd seen yesterday, but it felt like she gazed down on it from a mile in the sky. It was interesting.

She moved on quickly. She really had no time for this.

She figured she'd probably get back and find that they'd beaten her there, and her mother would chastise ' _Nazz, silly girl, what were you thinking?_ ' and she'd laugh, before she didn't mean it cruelly. She hoped that would happen, at the very least.

She flicked her light back on to explore the dark recesses of the offices.

From down a long, dark corridor of offices, she heard something thud. It was probably nothing, just a bit of debris finally separating from its base and hitting the floor. But, nonetheless, it wigged her out. But she kept going. She pointed the light into office after office as she passed them, each time terrified to turn her light into one room and find it occupied, and the man or woman inside would turn and look at them with glowing, unearthly eyes. The prospect of unearthly eyes reminded her of the thing she'd seen at Double Dee's house a couple nights prior, whatever it was. Because it totally was not a demon, not matter what they said. Nazz didn't believe in those things.

On her left, she passed a small bathroom. On the right, a larger office, its windows busted and a breeze rolling in through them. Inside, Nazz saw a small on the floor in the back, silhouetted by the morning sky.

She stepped in and looked around for evidence they'd been there.

She heard a whimpering voice from behind.

She turned...and heard a voice, the same voice, snap at itself, hissing an angry whisper...coming from the bathroom across the hall. She couldn't make out what the voice was saying nor who it belonged to. Frightened as she was, she approached the bathroom door and listened.

The voice fell silent for a long moment. It felt like two minutes had past before she heard a soft, almost feminine but decidedly male voice whisper, quivering in horror, " _What did you do with her hands_?"

Whoever it was, it wasn't Dad, nor was it Jonny's Dad. So she got the hell out of there. She hurried down the corridor, crunching through broken glass and running out of the company's double doors as she heard, she was certain, the high-pitched SHRIEK of an unoiled door being thrown open.

She ran to the stairs as a swath of light passed across the hallway. She realized after a quick moment it wasn't her own flashlight.

"Hey!" called a deep male voice from down the hallway, and she heard running footsteps coming toward her as the flashlight beam bounced, still trained on her, and she could her a set of keys jingling with each running step the man took. "Get back here!" the man, who Nazz realized must have been a security guard, shouted.

But Nazz had already committed to running, so she busted through the stairwell door and ran down the stairs in the dark, fumbling for her flashlight and, pretty predictably, she thought, fell down the whole flight, flicking on the flashlight as she went, pain shooting across her body from different points of contact as she rolled down the hard, concrete and metal steps till she and the flashlight hit the landing between floors. She took no time stumbling up and following the flashlight as it bounced off the wall and rolled for the gap between the flights of stairs looking down the entirely of the stairwell, and she threw herself at it as it rolled toward the gap under the railing and caught it before it could fall.

The door to the fifteenth floor flew open above and she heard a man running after her.

She jumped up and fled down the stairs, quick, fast and in a hurry, flight by flight, forgetting how much it killed her lungs and body to run that long down that many stairs, and when she hit the lobby she kept running, ignoring Kevin's bike and just trying to get out, and she skidded across the floor on the broken glass and couldn't fix her balance in time, so she fell, putting out her arm to catch herself and smashing it into the glass-covered floor, imbedding her arms with dozens and dozens of stabbing shards. She screamed but skittered back to her feet anyway and ran for the door as the security guard came running from the stairwell.

He was gaining on her as she leapt through the window - and she heard a crash of glass and clattering of keys and she realized, without looking back, that he had fallen over the chandelier in the middle of the floor, somehow missing it in the midst of the chase.

She took off across the street and hid inside another office building, then turned around to watch the Maltron building.

After a moment, he came running out of the building, bloody from his fall. He ran back and forth down the street looking for her. But, for all intents and purposes, she was gone.

She watched him stand in the lobby or out front for the next fifteen minutes, talking with someone on his walkie-talkie. Her heart pounded harder and harder each time he'd pass dangerously close to the front desk, nearly finding Kevin's bike and no doubt impounding it.

She took the waiting time looking between the Maltron building and her arm, picking the pieces of glass one by one, sucking in long, slow breathes and letting them out again. Slow and steady. The backside of her forearm looked like it had hit with a blast of buckshot.

After a good long wait, she saw him walk back to the stairwell and head back upstairs. She went back for her bag and Kevin's bike and rode the latter right out of downtown.

Next up was a Cefco gas station her father frequented each time they came through. An old friend worked there and her dad enjoyed swinging by to visit him. It seemed like as good of a shot as any of finding them, and Jonny's parents with them.

She had to take a break on the way. The running had taken a lot of her energy. She ate another Moon Pie and drank a bottle of water. Then, she was back on her way.

It took an hour and a half to get there. The gas station was located in a more scenic part of the city, where storefronts were more rare and were replaced by sprawling fields and woods. She was close to the city park. The campsites of the park were her next stop, and they were nearby.

Before Nazz reached the gas station, nearly a half-mile away from it, she rode past a small encampment of, at most, a hozen people grilling under a pavilion, once very recently a popular spot for city children to hold birthday parties which they had turned into a makeshift living space with canvas tent add-ons and lawn chairs spread about. She heard deep, male laughter echoing across the field toward her from the pavillion. She ignored the encampment, moving as quietly and as low as possible to avoid catching their attention. She feared they would see her as she rode away and call to friends or wives, shouting "Hey, there's a girl over there!" or calling directly to her, shouting, "What are you doin' over there? Get over here!" But she rode past them without a problem and soon, they were distant enough to look like ants.

Then she was upon the CEFCO, which stood at the front of a small lot of overgrown grassland leading, the further it went back, into the woods at the very edge of the city par. It was still too close to the pavilion and its laughing inhabitants for her liking, but nonetheless she hit the brakes on the bike and it skidded to a halt under the awning of the gas station. It looked like every other building in the world did now, cracked, with no windows to speak of. Dude, glass companies were gonna be making a killing in the near future.

She approached the open-air front wall of the store where its windows, advertising cigarettes, beer brands and that the station was "NOW HIRING!" had once hung. She didn't see anyone inside, but persisted anyways. She had to be sure. She knew there were other portions of the gas station. A small pair of rooms in the back that operated as inventory storage and a small office respectively, not to mention the areas behind the cold beverage racks the storage room let into.

Nazz walked carefully over the broken glass littering the gas station interior. Most of the snacks and product the store carried had been stolen, and most of the racks sat empty.

She jumped over the counter and stood behind it. She tried the "EMPLOYEES ONLY" door but found it locked. She knocked. "Hello? Mom? Dad?" she stepped back and waited. Knocked again. "Hello? This is Nazz Von Bartonschmeer, Martin's daughter. Hello?"

There was no answer. She tried the door again. It was still locked. But she really wanted to get back there.

So she jumped the counter again and tried to climb through the beverage racks on the wall. Even as slim as she was, she couldn't fit.

She came out the front of the store and walked around the back, taking the side facing away from the encampment of people nearby even though they were far away and not likely to see her at the distance, since they hadn't even seen her as she'd ridden right past them.

As she turned the corner to the back of the store, she thought she was faced with nothing more than the overgrown field that stood behind the gas station. But upon a closer look as she approached the back door, she saw a torn camouflage tarp on the ground hidden by the surrounding grass, covering a half dozen bodies lined up with their feet facing the back door of the gas station.

Suddenly, Nazz didn't need to go inside anymore.

Nazz slowly approached the tarp, suddenly filled with a sharp anxiety that made her heart jackhammer, jumping up into her throat and sending a nauseous twang up it into her mouth with each twisting, frenzied beat.

She threw the tarp off.

The body closest to her was a tall, slim man in a sweater vest, tan shirt and jeans. He was balding with long, curly hair and a patchy mustache. He had a chubby face, even though he had a rail slim body, and his jaw hung slack. He wore glasses, but one of the lenses carried a small, round bullet hole and the eye socket beneath held a pool of stagnant, congealed blood running down the side of his face.

It was Jonny's dad. Next in line, a portly woman with brown, equally curled hair. Dead. Past them, a blond couple that Nazz couldn't bare to look at.

She turned and ran back around the front of the gas station, grabbed up Kevin's bike and took off, even as she struggled to catch her breath even though she couldn't have been winded, she'd barely run twenty yards and just started riding it, and within seconds of frantic peddling, her eyes were blinded with hot tears that streamed down her face and she was racked with sobs even as she fled.

She couldn't see. It wasn't like the pitch black blindness of the stairwell; everything was blotchy, swimming in her vision and covered in dark blotches that swam across her line of sight, and everything was fuzzy and vague and foggy through her eyes.

She couldn't see ahead of her, and she accidentally rode the bike off the road, hitting a ditch straight-on with the front tire, buckling it and sending her flying head-over-tea-kettle, catching some air time across the field ahead and then slamming hard on her outstretched hands and knees, her head hitting the ground and catching on it, sucking it down to her chest and sending her rolling over herself before skidding to a halt in the field, crying and in pain.

In pain from falling down the stairs at the Maltron building and now from crashing Kevin's beloved bike. She rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself up off the ground with weak, shaking arms and felt so ridiculous at her weakness as she sobbed and sobbed and couldn't stop sobbing, even as she heard the running footsteps coming across the field, heard legs dashing through the tall grass and being lashed with it as they ran.

And soon, Nazz felt hands touching her, voices asking if she was alright, men and women's voices, and she just wanted to run but she just _could not catch her breath_ and the blotches in her eyes were getting worse and everything was too fuzzy to make out and blurring together, mixing like batter in a cake, and there was more darkness in her vision than not, and then she passed out.

Kevin and Jonny had picked up a tagalong before leaving the Cul-de-Sac, and now they all three stood with shovels at the Pit, digging out a pair of identical graves right next to one another, Kevin's dad's pickup backed up to the graves nearby, parked right next to the abandoned old rusty front loader. Eddy had insisted he had only come out of boredom and told the others not to "blow a gasket about it" as he worked alongside them. Jonny worked with Eddy and Kevin dug his grave alone, trying to keep it all together. Since he'd cried with Jonny, he was struggling to keep from crying all the time. The simplest thought was enough to drive him to the verge of tears. Thinking about Nazz. Or Rolf. Jimmy's parents in the bed of his dad's truck. Jonny's loneliness and desperation for human interaction to the point he'd help someone he'd barely spoken to dig a grave for another pair of nearly complete strangers. The thought of Eddy helping them out through the begrudging kindness of his heart made Kevin shake.

Kevin was glad he dug alone. It allowed him the opportunity, if he needed it, to cry. He knew he had to get himself together though. He needed to be strong for the others. But maybe, he thought, they didn't need him to be strong for them. His eyes welled. His nose ran. He sniffled.

At the next grave over, Eddy listened, incredulous, clutching his shovel with both hands. Jonny worked diligently next to him. Eddy leaned over and whispered, "Hey, fathead." Jonny, fathead, stopped and looked at him. "Is shovelchin over there cryin'?"

"Oh, yeah," Jonny nodded, "he does that." Jonny went back to digging.

Eddy looked back over toward Kevin, then went back to digging. "Hey, Jonny," Eddy said.

"Yeah, Eddy?"

"Is everybody actin' weird around here or what?"

"Everybody's just stressed out. People act outta character when they're upset."

Eddy glared at Jonny. "Since when'd you turn into Dear Abby?" That was new from Jonny, trying to give him insight into someone else's brain, and doing so without coloring it in his own personal oak-tinted glasses first. Jonny seemed like a completely different person than the one he'd been even a few days ago. So did Kevin. Since when was Kevin lamenting to Eddy the stress of leadership and crying in open graves next door to Eddy? Hell, _Eddy_ seemed like a different person now even to himself. He had become so quiet and reserved the last few days. He couldn't remember everything he had done yesterday, but he was pretty damn position he had not spoken to one person all day. Well, at least that wasn't of his own volition, at least not partially. He could have gone over to Double Dee's to hang out, but not with him obsessing over that _thing_ in the garage or even with that _thing_ in the same house, for that matter. He still clamored for affection. He had run into Kevin and Jonny on their way to pick up Jimmy's family and jumped at the opportunity for some kind of human contact.

Eddy felt a strange emptiness inside him, one that had been growing recently. Things had been changing around the Cul-de-Sac and around town. He'd never thought of himself as a fan of routine, but several constants that had _always_ been present in his life had now changed. For one, he'd hardly gone a period of three days without seeing one or both of his parents. Right now, he was on day 5 of independence. He worried about his mom. His dad could drop dead though, for all he cared. It seemed like every parent in the Cul-de-Sac was either dead or missing, with the exceptions of Ed's parents, who were completely useless. School wasn't meeting any more. It seemed like everything had fallen apart, in nothing more than _4 days_ since the earthquake. 4 fucking days, and the world turned into the wild,wild west. These were lawless times.

Eddy realized how much he really did hate change, deep down. Moving from summer to fall was like a culture shock for him. Even re-arranging his room was enough to ruin his day most times. He wanted things to stay the way they were forever. Things had changed so much so fast these last few days, it gave Eddy whiplash and left him speechless. He just needed to get his bearings again, and he'd be fine.

"Since me and Kev got to be good friends, Eddy," Jonny said.

" _What_?" Eddy hissed, "Since when are you and the wet hanky over there 'good friends?'"

"Since the last few days. Golly, Eddy, keep up."

Eddy held up his shovel. "You see this, Jonny? This is gonna go right where the sun don't shine if you don't get the fuck outta my hair with that stupid superiority complex you grew all the sudden. You catch me, chief?"

"Aaaalright, Eddy. Whatever floats ya boat. Y'know, maybe ya should should get some rest. You seem stressed out."

Eddy let out a grunt that rose in pitch with his anger like a tea kettle, gripping his shovel with both hands. He could've cracked Jonny upside the head with that shovel right then, he was so angry. But instead, he swallowed it up and shoved it down like clothes in a suitcase, and he went back to digging.

Ed came up the stairs and peeked into the living room to see what his dad was up to. But he wasn't sitting in the recliner in front of the dead TV anymore. Ed let out a breath he'd been holding and walked out the front door like a human being.

He went over to Nazz's house and knocked. He waited diligently for an answer. None came. After a couple minutes, he knocked again.

After his second set of knocks, he heard a window on the second floor slide open. He stepped back and looked up. Sarah leaned out the window to look down at him. "It's open, stupid!"

"Where's Nazz?" he asked.

"She's out on business. Whadda you want?"

"I just want to see my baby sister," he said. Sarah sighs above and mumbled, "The door's open, stupid." Then she disappeared back inside and shut the window. Ed reached for the door, turned the knob and found it unlocked. He let himself in. He wandered through the house for a bit before he found the stairs, then bounded up them.

At the top of the stairs, he was met with a problem. He had no idea which room Sarah was in.

But Sarah came out to meet him, so he didn't have to worry about it. "Hello, baby sister," Ed said, playing with his jacket.

"There. You've seen me." She went back into the room and began shutting the door.

"Um," Ed said, and hurried over to stick his head through before she got it closed. "How is Jimmy today?"

Sarah sighed and turned to face him, letting the door fall open, crossing her arms in front of him. "He's devastated, Ed. He's been ruined."

"His mom and dad?"

"No, because the polar bears are dying, Ed. Yes, he's upset about his parents. Of course he is."

"Oh. Well. Um. I think Mom would like to see you, you know, some time soon. She misses you, baby sister."

"Well, what else is new?"

"Um. Everybody missed you being there at the house with us."

"Dad misses me?" she asked, partially hoping he really did, but bitterly knowing he didn't.

"No, not him," Ed said, and looked at her pitifully. Sarah realized he meant he missed having her there. She sighed.

"Jimmy needs me, Ed," she said, motioning to the catatonic boy on the bed behind her. "He's all broken up. He hasn't even moved since he found out."

"Is he going to be okay?" Ed asked. It was sweet and sincere. Sometimes Sarah forget he was much more than a block of wood, like Plank.

"I don't know, Ed," she shrugged. "Maybe he'll come back when it stops hurting. He hasn't peed or pooped on himself yet, not that I can tell, so he's gotta be goin' to the bathroom when I'm not looking, so maybe he'll get better." She looked back at him. "God, I hope he will." She turned back to Ed but didn't meet his gaze. "How's mom and dad?"

"Mom's still sick. Dad's still rude."

"What's he doin' to you, Ed?"

"Nothin'."

"What's he doing, Ed?"

"Just bein' Dad, y'know how it is."

"Yeah. Well…" Sarah looked back at Jimmy again. He had his back to them, facing the window, still all curled up. He looked so small lying there. "Maybe he'll be better off if I'm not here. Then he doesn't have to worry about sneaking around me to go to the bathroom. Do you want me to come home tonight, Ed?"

Ed grinned at her. "Well. I'll see what I can do, okay?" she said, and Ed nodded.

"Okay, baby sister. I'll see you tonight." He pointed at her and snapped his fingers. " _Maybe._ "

Sarah chuckled. "Alright, dummy. See you later."

"Okay!" And off he went. Sarah walked back to the bed with Jimmy and got in. She laid there with him for nearly an hour.

Within the hour, the graves were dug, and the Eddy, Jonny and Kevin carried Jimmy's parents, wrapped up in sheets from the linen cabinet in Kevin's house, more trying to suffocate their bodies' stench than out of respect for them, at arm's length over to the holes and lowered them inside, Eddy grumbling in annoyance the whole way. They filled the holes back up in no time and before Jonny and Eddy could make a run back to the truck to grab hold of the good seat (the truck was a two-seater), Kevin asked them to hang around while he took off his hat, held it over his waist and said a quiet prayer.

"Um, God, Jesus, please watch over these two people who we have laid to rest today. Well I didn't know 'em very well but I'm told they were well loved by Jimmy, at least till they made some mistakes at the end, there. Please forgive them, God, for whatever mistakes they have made. From what I saw in my spot, they seemed like pretty cool dudes. Uh, they seemed like a pretty cool dude and, uh, lady-dude. We hope you, God, and Jesus, you too, will guide their souls up to Heaven. Thank you for you guys's time. Amen. Alright, I'm done now. You ain't gotta stand around and listen to me go on no more, since you seem so ready to go."

They rode back to the Cul-de-Sac, Kevin frowning through the windshield, Jonny smiling, satisfied, in the passenger seat, and Eddy packed between them on the bitch hump, grimacing.

When they made it back, Eddy went home and Kevin started walked over to Rolf's house with Jonny on his ass. "Where we headed, Kevin?" Jonny asked.

" _I'm_ going over to Rolf's house. Yo, Jonny, I gotta do this alone, alright? I gotta to Rolf, and he's a pretty difficult guy to get a hold of right now."

Jonny stood there in front of Kevin, trying to figure out a way to stick around. "You try his Jitterbug again?"

"I'm just gonna knock on his door. Alright? I'll talk to you later, Jonny."

"Aaalright. See ya around, buddy." Jonny left, feeling as sad as he looked. Kevin continued to Rolf's house feeling like he'd had a weight taken off his shoulders, and he knocked at Rolf's door expecting not to get an answer.

But Rolf answered, and he did it pretty quickly. "Hello?" he said. "What is it you request of Rolf?"

"His time," Kevin sputtered and corrected himself, " _Your_ time, man. That's all I want." Rolf stared at him for a minute, flexing his jaw. Stone-faced. If he was thinking all the time he stood there staring, Kevin couldn't read it on his dull face. "Just a few minutes, Rolf."

"Why do you need this time of mine? Have you a valediction? If you have, say it here and say it now, my good friend! I have no time for the chitty-chitty-chattery chat, yes? There is much to do!"

"A valediction? What? I just wanna talk, Rolf. Ain't you got time to talk, man?"

Rolf grumbled. "What must you speak of?"

"What happened? With your dad, dude?"

"He has risen to the clouds. He has joined Nana, locked arms with his brothers and become the next link in the eternal chain. His magnificent presence graces the land of the - what do you say? - The You Ess of Ay no longer!"

Kevin caught a glimpse of the house behind Rolf's form in the doorway. Things were clean, too clean to be a part of Rolf's house. It took Kevin a moment to realize it was so clean because it was nearly empty. Rolf had cleared the living room nearly completely of furniture but for a small lawn chair and Rolf's massive TV with the tiny screen, as well as several TV dinners and a half-finished jug of homemade milk on the floor surrounding the two pieces of furniture. "What's up, Rolf? You movin' out, or somethin'?"

Rolf stared at Kevin for a moment. "If you must come into my home, you must."

He stepped aside. Kevin hesitated, then stepped inside.

The house was barren. The only other piece of furniture left in the living room was a gas lantern sitting in a corner. "What's happenin' here, Rolf? I mean, are you leaving?"

"Alas, yes, my friend, I fear I have a purpose no longer for staying in the Cul-de-Sac." He spoke gravely as he walked off into the kitchen.

Kevin saw the metaphor of Rolf walking away from him, which pissed him off because A.) _Rolf was walking away from him_ , and B.) Kevin was beginning to comprehend the contextual usage of metaphors, which was irritating because he had insisted in class last week to his English teacher that he would never, not ever, understand them. In protest, Kevin stomped off after him, past a pile of ratty old luggage packed to the brim as well as some overflowing garbage bags being used as auxiliary luggage. "What? Why? Why are you leaving?"

Kevin saw as he followed Rolf that all the cabinets in the kitchen had been flung open. A black garbage bag sat, half-filled with kitchen instruments, on the floor, jutting with pots, pans and silverware. A fork had punched through the plastic on the side. Kevin approached a cabinet still stuffed with tupperware and began shoving them down into the bag. "Do you have the mind of a foul?" Rolf called back over his shoulder. "I have no reason to stay!"

Kevin stood by the kitchen island. "Is it because of your father?"

"Have you a valediction, shovelchin Kevin?"

Kevin tried to make himself look big and imposing and smart, standing with his legs apart net to the island. But Rolf could only see him get smaller and smaller until he seemed like nothing more than an infant. "Don't go."

Rolf stopped packing and turned to Kevin, offended. "What is this? Do you think Rolf is bound in following your instruction, yes?"

" _Please_ , don't go, Rolf," Kevin said softly. "I want you to stay."

"You do not listen to Rolf."

"Rolf, dude, I am in a real weird place right now and I don't really wanna have to deal with this."

Rolf spun on his heel and continued packing. "Then you may go."

"Nazz has been gone for like two days now and I don't even really know if she's comin' back, man. I should a' even let her go alone, but I just figured she'd get off pissed off at me for tryin' to 'imply her inferiority' by my asking or whatever so I didn't, y'know?" Kevin could scarcely hold back the tears as he spoke. He figured if he continued, it would only get worse, but he was on a roll now and couldn't stop. "And she was supposed to be the goddamn search party and now we might hafta send out a goddamn search party for the goddamn search party, and now you're leaving too. I might never see you again either, man. So now with you and Nazz pretty much officially out-of-commission, I gotta stoop down and hang out with weirdos like Jonny fucking 2x4 and Eddy McGee. What am I supposed ta do without ya, man?" By the time he finished, he was fully crying.

Rolf noticed and stopped packing once again, and slowly approached Kevin, leaning down to peer at his wet face. "What is this? Do Rolf's eyes deceive the brain of Rolf? Does shovelchin Kevin cry now, at Rolf's feet?"

"Rolf, like I said, it's a weird time for me."

"Rolf has not cried since, oh, he has left the old country. This was what, ten, fifteen years in the past? Rolf has grown past these things!"

Rolf turned his chin up at Kevin and spun again to continue packing, finishing the cabinet and moving onto the next. Kevin felt anger bubbling up from within and wiped his face with his sleeve. "Where would you be going? Do you even have a place to go?"

Rolf would not even look back at Kevin now. "Yes, I will go join my cousin Bob in his conquest of, what is it, the Middle Western of the You-Ess of Ayy."

"You're going to the Midwest?" Kevin spat, clearly punctuating each word to emphasize its ridiculousness.

"It is the only place Rolf may go! Rolf may not return to the old country, as Rolf cannot fathom to deduce the methods of travel! All methods Rolf know baffle and confuse Rolf! Tell me, my friend, wise patriot of You-Ess of Ayy, how is it the infernal contraptions do not fall down? How?"

"Well, they're jet planes, Rolf, and they got jets, and they turn the wings on the side, and...they shoot jet shit past 'em and it makes it go up - Rolf, I'm really not in the right mindset to explain the aerodynamics of air travel right now, dude. I just - who is your cousin, man? You never told me about this guy. Who is he, Rolf? This Bob dude?"

"He is of Rolf's familial tree. He is Rolf's family. Rolf has no family here, not with the passage of his dear beloved father."

"You were terrified of your dad, Rolf."

"But yet, he was still Rolf's papa, no? His body carried the very blood of Rolf! Have you no knowledge of the family unit?"

"Yeah, I think I got 'knowledge about the family unit,'" Kevin mocked, "I know about family here, dude. You don't think you got family here? We're your family, Rolf. You're our brother. You took a look at the Cul-de-Sac lately, dude? There ain't nobody 'round but us here. Except for Ed and those guys, we're all outta adults to take care of us. We gotta stick together, man! You and everybody on this Cul-de-Sac, man, we're family. We're brothers. You and me, man, we're brothers."

"Rolf knows not of what brotherhood you speak! Rolf has no siblings, not in this country." He sinched the garbage bag shut and tossed it to the pile with the others. He took a moment to gather his strength, pulling another garbage bag from a roll as Kevin stomped closer to him. Rolf ignored him, and took to pushing the kitchen island off its base to reveal the firepit below.

"Neither do I, dude. But your blood brothers ain't your only brothers," Kevin said slowly, trying to sound wise. "Your friends are, too."

Rolf snapped the bag out and began picking up the coal from the pit, tossing them into the fresh garbage bag. "Rolf should not have opened his home this afternoon. Have you a valediction?"

"I don't know what a valediction is, Rolf! Talk to me, man!"

Rolf grew angry, crushing a lump of coal in his fist. He dropped the garbage bag and stomped toward Kevin, cocking his head out from his shoulders toward Kevin's face, veins in his face and neck bulging as he spoke. "You have taken enough time from Rolf's day already, no? You must be going! Rolf must leave at once!" He backed Kevin out of the kitchen and into the living room.

"When are you leaving? Would you a' even said bye if I didn't come here?" Kevin's back hit the front door, the knob jabbing his backbone. Rolf shoved Kevin aside and threw the door open and motioned for Kevin to leave.

"It is no time for goodbyes! Rolf leaves at first light in the morning!"

"Why are you in such a hurry?" was what Kevin would have asked Rolf, and he had nearly gotten half the words out of his mouth before Rolf had slammed the door in his face. "Fucking dick!" Kevin shouted at the closed door. Through it, he heard Rolf begin to throw a barrage of incomprehensible curses at Kevin, even as his voice retreated off back toward the kitchen.

Kevin stomped back to his house and slammed the front door on his way in, knocking loose glass out of cracked windows on the front of the house. He sulked into the kitchen and began playing with the gun collection he had apparently inherited, checking each of the pistols for their calibers of ammunition and then scrounging them up from the disconnected corners of the house. For some pistols, the only bullets he could find were in their cylinders or the magazines already jacked into their grips. He would continue to load and reload the pistols as he sat cross-legged on the floor in the kitchen for several hours until he was interrupted by a loud noise.

But before all that, shortly after Kevin took Rolf's front door to the face, Nazz had been sat facing a very old man on one knee who applied disinfectant cream to the scrapes on her knees. The skin around his eyes were well-worn and deeply wrinkled. The man, whose name Nazz thought was Penny, seemed to be no stranger to laughter. Nazz wondered if he was one of the men she'd heard laughing before, but his voice was not as deep nor as boisterous as that laughter. Mr. Penny's voice was soft and high-pitched, like the risen pitch of a tea kettle but hardly as obnoxious. His lips were hidden with a big, white mustache.

Nazz felt her face and her nose in particular, which she could tell was already scabbing over from where she'd drug it along the earth in her mad dash race from the CEFCO.

Mr. Penny was not smiling now. He had gone from rubbing disinfectant on Nazz's knees to inspecting her arms and shoulders, which she bore in the cheap sleeveless tee shirt she'd been wearing since yesterday. His calloused hands touched a bruise, inspected it, then pressed its thumb against it, and reflexively Nazz grunted and pulled back, but Penny grabbed a hold of her arm to keep her in place. "These bruises couldn't have been obtained when you fell." His cool blue eyes turned to meet hers under his big white eyebrows. "Are you sure everything's all right?"

"Yessir," Nazz said, as monotone as everything else she'd said so far to the others so far. "I fell down some stairs."

"Mm-hmm," Mr. Penny said, eyeing Nazz sidelong with his brow furrowed and pursed lips visible even under his mustache. "I've heard that one before. And what of this arm that's full of holes, miss?"

"It was a few minutes after I fell. I slipped on some busted glass and put my arm out to catch myself."

Mr. Penny's neck tightened and he bared his teeth almost as reflexively as Nazz had snatched her arm away, grimacing at the prospect of the injury's acquisition. Nazz noticed he had nice teeth, well cared for in his long life. He made a distressed noise along with the slightly exaggerated face that had been meant to make her laugh. She hadn't even cracked a smile. When had she gotten so serious? At least he seemed to believe her with this injury. "Ouch."

"It didn't hurt till I pulled all the glass out."

"Mm," Mr. Penny grimaced again, "I'm not sure I would have had your resolve to do so. You pulled it all out yourself?"

"Yes sir," Nazz said, proud of her resolve.

"May I see your hands, now, miss?" Nazz abided and she turned her hands over so that Mr. Penny could inspect them, her palms open to keep from hurting. Any time she tried to ball them up, it hurt like hell. She'd torn them up pretty good hitting the ground. She had already picked one rock out sitting around waiting to be tended to, as the other members of community had stood around just out of sight as if barring that had made them noiseless as well, discussing what to do with her. A wide, thick slab of skin on her right hand had been torn loose and hung down over her wrist, but she had slid it back into place before Mr. Penny had come. But Mr. Penny gently touched a finger to it, and the skin slid in his hand, and he frowned again. "You'd have thought the grass would have done more to cushion you. The ground's done quite a number on your hands. Your knees weren't so bad. Now I see where you took the brunt of the injury."

With his free hand, Mr. Penny played with a slim gold chain dangling from his neck that Nazz flinched at the very sight of. It reminded her of her father's chain. It took Mr. Penny no time to notice her apparent obsession with the piece of jewelry. He held it out to her from his neck and smiled a wrinkled smile. "My granddaughter gave it to me," he said, very proud.

Mr. Penny took Nazz's hands again and gently removed another rock from Nazz's hand. He rubbed them down with more cream, pulled a bucket of water over and brought a hand towel from inside, squeezed it out, and cleaned the blood off Nazz's hands with it. He grabbed up a roll of bandaging and wrapping her right hand with it. He put bandaids on the other hand and said she could leave the knees to air out if she cared to.

She nodded and he helped her to her feet, a gentleman from a classic age. With her bandaged hand, she reached down a picked up one of her two bags, which she had insisted she bring with her even as she left the bike behind. It hurt to pick up but the pain subsided once she got the strap onto her shoulder. Before she could grab the other, Mr. Penny had already bent over and grabbed one of its straps, then stopped and looked up at her. "May I?" he asked and Nazz hesitated before nodding to him in the affirmative.

She had made a bit of a scene when she'd woken up at the pavilion and found the men around her unzipping one of the bags to rifle through, to search out any 'contraband' she had with her, by which she suspected the men had meant marijuana or some other depressant. Nazz had loudly and somewhat violently refused, yanking the bag away for fear of theft. The men spoke of how little trust she had for them and a woman behind them, Molly, who watched while she leaned against a support beam, had said, "Could you blame her? I wouldn't trust a soul either, if I was her."

They had seen nothing more when she had arrived but some sort of feral girl with a mess of hair, a bloody face, bloody hands and legs, covered in dirt from the crash. A violent, silent girl who barely seemed human.

She composed herself as she awaited medical attention, washing her face with the hand towel Mr. Penny had used to wash her hands and her lower legs before them, and had fixed her hair simply by running her hands through it, a feat her mother had playfully scoffed and shook her head at. She had such nice hair, her mother insisted.

With her hair fixed and face, arms and legs clean, she emerged looking brand new, if only with her beauty besmirched by scabs from dirt scorches torn across her nose, forehead and cheek. She probably looked like shit. It wouldn't be till she used the hot, sweaty lady's room tacked onto the back of the pavilion that she noticed she must have bashed her eye into something, because the blood vessels in it had burst and turned most of the white of her left eye blood red. What a mess.

When she had arrived, after cleaning her face with the towel and bucket hastily and anxiously handed over by a slim, nervous woman called Annie and before Mr. Penny was let through, she was vetted by a tall, handsome man whose hard, blue-collar edge was not hidden by his soft features, fashionable gray jeans and long sleeve jean shirt over a Ramones tee and small, round, wire-rimmed glasses, and a slightly shorter woman with a mane of thick, shoulder-clipped curly strawberry blond hair and similar fashion sense (perhaps one always dressed the other), what Nazz could imagine to be a husband and wife pair of leaders for the small community. The man was named Brewis (which Nazz had initially, of course, mistaken for Bruce and had been lightly corrected by him in good humor) and his wife was named Nat.

They interrogated her briefly, asking her what her name was, where she was going, where she'd come from and why she was leaving like a bat outta hell. To the first, she made the mistake of answering honestly, telling them her real first and last name, which Nat had commented was a "mouthful" with annoyed Nazz, which she remedied with the rest of her answers, which were "Lemon Brook," "Cherry Hills," and "because I was being chased by some yellowjackets." Brewis seemed to take more to her answers than Nat, who seemed suspicious, likely because she wasn't distracted by her light sobs and apparent innocence and precociousness like Brewis.

They asked her if she had come from friends or family in Cherry Hills and Nazz said yes, she was coming from some family. Her father, she claimed much to Brewis' sorrow, had been abusing her while her mother purposefully ignored it, and she had taken the opportunity of the earthquake's aftermath to escape her father's evil reach. She felt like a traitor for even talking about her "father" like that, when the real thing, for her, was one of the kindest men in the world. But they couldn't know that, or else they might ask her to take them to them, and then she'd be in deep shit.

She didn't intend, however, on giving them the time to follow her up on her lies, since she planned on slipping away as soon as possible, which would be at its latest, she figured, that night when everyone went to bed.

They'd told her they wouldn't try and take her back home. They would offer her food and shelter for a few days till she recovered and then she could choose to leave or stay if she'd be willing to work for them in exchange for the continued housing, of course. They'd asked several more questions, one of which, strangely, was whether or not she had a gun. Nazz had said, "No, of course not." They asked if she had any other weapons and Nazz had said, "No, of course not."

Dusk was rapidly approaching as she awaited dinner among the population of the group. She noticed that one of the tents, the flaps of which hung open, was filled with rifles.

For a while, Nazz went over to an edge of the pavilion where Molly sat with what was left of Kevin's bike, slowly but surely putting it back together. Somehow when she crashed, she'd manage to rip both the handlebars and the front tire off. A couple pot bellied men spent a half hour picking up pieces while Brewis and Nat interrogated Nazz, and now they sat on the table of the picnic bench Molly sat on, with her back to it, figuring out how each piece fit. Molly told Nazz she had been a tomboy in school and in an purposeful act of rebellion, had learned how to take cars apart and put them back together just to hold it over the guys who thought they knew better. She'd actually gotten so good at it, and had such little idea of what to do after high school, she'd gone to a trade school and gotten certified as an auto mechanic. She had been working as one for the past eight years since high school.

"I've never tried to fix a bike before, but I fix cars for a living, so how hard could _this_ really be, right?" Nazz shrugged. Molly looked at her again and said with a little less confidence, "Right?" Nazz laughed and Molly chalked that up as a win. "It's a nice bike, if I do say so myself. A real hot rod." As Molly twisted a nut onto the stem where the handlebars used to be, Nazz saw that she wore a small, child-like blue watch on her right hand.

She asked at one point to go to the lady's room, which she was of course allowed, insisting that she bring her bags along with her (Brewis whispered to an irritated friend that she must have had trust issues because of her parental abuse), which was also of course allowed, but with the company of a wife among the community, Cheryl, who said she had to go to and that she'd show Nazz the way. Nazz swore to herself and followed.

"Nazz Von...what was it?" Cheryl asked, sticking her nose entirely where it didn't belong.

"Nazz Von Bartonschmeer."

"Von Bartonsh…" she trailed off. "What is that, German?"

"It's Dutch," Nazz said as they went into the lady's room. When Nazz caught sight of her face, she let out a surprised, "Holy shit!" to which Cheryl laughed and locked herself into the only bathroom stall. Nazz waited as she inspected her injured face. Nazz, being too self-aware to not notice how attractive she was, let her vanity take hold a moment and she lamented her injuries, hoping they wouldn't leave scars. After that, waiting for Cheryl to get out of the bathroom, she wondered if Cheryl had offered to join her purposefully to make sure she wouldn't run. Nazz had the backpack with Kevin's pistol slung over her shoulder for easy reach.

Later, she had dinner with the community at the picnic tables under the pavilion, where she sat at a table with Brewis and Nat, as well as Mr. Penny and a boisterous man (who laughed a lot) Brewis and Nat jokingly referred to exclusively as "Brainiac." Brainiac was a 40-year-old man of middle height with a clumsily cropped head of short blond hair, who laughed a lot and made many good-hearted jokes. He wore a pastel green polo shirt that bulged at the waist and nearly flowed over at the stomach with tight tan shorts and a pair of loafers with knees socks. He sat on the sides of his feet, the soles pointed at one another. He struck Nazz a pretty harmless geek.

Mr. Penny sat and laughed along with the others, but did not speak.

Just before dinner had been nightfall. Nazz had been to pavilions like these before during the day and at night and knew very well the sounds that visiting them brought. She knew the loud songs of night bugs that would surround the small enclave of humanity, whirring rhythmically through the night in ever-heightening pitch.

But this pavilion brought with it no chatter of insects. Only dead silence Nazz had missed during the day. The only sounds were Brainiac and other men's laughter.

After dinner, Brewis and Nat took Nazz around the backside of their encampment, on the other side of their canvas tents, where they laid out a blanket and pillow for Nazz to sleep on. Brainiac and Cheryl, apparently husband and wife, joined them at their bed station nearby, which was another blanket with an air mattress and comforter on top, with a wind-up lantern to the side along with a pair of books. A romance novel (probably for Chery) and a book on survivalism for dummies for Brainiac. After a long, loud, lighthearted conversation the other four tried to make Nazz join in on, Brewis and Nat left and Brainiac asked Nazz what she'd get up to tonight. Nazz said she'd probably just call it a night.

Nazz laid on the blanket for what she measured as, give or take, a couple hours. Brianiac and Cheryl had fallen silent more than an hour ago and after the hours had past, she sat up to see if Brainiac and Cheryl were asleep.

They were not. Cheryl laid in bed with a flashlight reading her book and Brainiac was sitting up, looking out over the grasslands beyond. He looked over and smiled at Nazz. "You a night owl too?"

Nazz shrugged. "I just woke up."

Brainiac lifted his brows and grinned at her like he's caught her in the act of something, and then laughed. "Well, I prosper at night. Can't say the same for most others I know though. I'm at my best at night and most other people, heck, I'd say everybody I know, they're all at their worst. Everybody gets so grouchy at night, and so irritable. I just wanna share the night with somebody, y'know? Even _she_ gets pretty grouchy." He pointed down at Cheryl, who grunted grouchily. "You a night owl?"

"I guess," Nazz mumbled uncomfortably, then caught herself picking at scabs and quit doing it.

"Yeah. All the best people are night people. You should be proud a' yourself, Miss Nazz. Hey, I know you're not really trustin' anybody right now, and you probably don't much care for me, but I just want to ask if you'd like to go see somethin' kind a' cool, kind a' strange out a ways toward the woods out there?"

Nazz sat and looked at Cheryl, who didn't look up from her book.

"I won't bite'cha, I swear to God, Miss Nazz."

Nazz thought it might be a good time to make an escape should anything go wrong. She shrugged and grabbed up her bags, wincing in pain at the gripping of them in her hands, and she stood up.

Brainiac laughed and stood up as well, and he hurried over. "Lemme get one a' those bags off ya, ma'am."

He took one of the bags from her shoulder without much waiting for a response. It was the one Nazz wouldn't have offered up; it was the one with the pistol.

"You ready?" Brainiac smiled at her. She shrugged and he smiled harder and they set off - but Brainiac stopped suddenly and turned to her. "You don't gotta if it makes you uncomfortable. I just figured you'd like to see it."

"I'm fine," Nazz said, and followed Brainiac through the lashing grass of the field. She looked over and, even in the darkness of the night, could see the CEFCO's silhouette in the middle distance.

She followed Brainiac out to the middle of the field and he stuck out an arm in front of her. "Be careful, now. You're liable to fall right in."

He and Nazz approached a strip of the field Nazz suddenly realized gave off a vague, red glow. They approached and edged up to the glowing fissure sawing through the field as far as Brainiac was willing to risk going. At the last step Nazz took, which was ahead of him, he reached out and grabbed her arm to make sure she didn't fall in. He had a strong grip. "Don't fall in," he said, nearly breathlessly.

She stepped back so he'd let loose of her and he did. He cleared his throat and they both peered down into the hole. "It's pretty warm, right? Get too close, it'll singe your arm hairs if you've got any. We set up camp near it on account of its heat. I don't know if you noticed, on a warm night like this, but when it was cooler a couple nights ago, you could feel the heat in the ground emanatin' off a' this."

No wonder there were no insects around.

Nazz looked at Brainiac, who was looking down into the hole. Then, he cut his eyes toward her and grinned. "Isn't that somethin'?"

A few hours prior, an hour or so after Kevin left Rolf's house, Ed was settling in at his own, comfortable at the thought that Sarah had come to join him about a half an hour ago. He had just left her room a few minutes ago and still had the big smile on his face that he'd been wearing since she arrived, one that had only faltered when coming down the stairs onto the first floor, where he quietly and quickly moved to the stairs, looking and listening for the presence of his father, who he couldn't see hide nor hair of. He hadn't seen Ed all day, not since leaving him in the living room right after they got back from Double Dee's house. Something about him not being around all day made Ed nervous, but he shook that off because Sarah was home!

He laid on his bed, hands interlocked behind his head, staring at the ceiling, feeling Sarah's movement upstairs as it vibrated through the house, smelling her light flowery scent as it ruminated around.

After laying there for a while, he read a comic book and went back up to check on Mom, then on Sarah, who smiled at him and everything. Smiling at him was something she never did. But for whatever reason, possibly because she was back near mom, he figured, she had been really sweet to him since she got back. He'd come in on her sitting on the floor, playing with dolls she hadn't touched in nearly a year. Seemed like things were getting back to some sort of normal for Ed, even if he could tell Mom was only getting worse.

He sat with her as well as Sarah for a brief while, but whereas he sat with Sarah in silence, he sat with Mom and talked for maybe twenty minutes. Well, he mostly talked and she mostly listening, smiling at him and stroking his cropped hair.

After a while, Ed reluctantly peeled himself away from his mom, shouting, "Love ya, Mom!" back through the door as he closed it, and he waited to finish shutting it long enough to hear her say, "I love you too, sweetheart."

Then he bounded back downstairs and went through his comic collection, looking for one he hadn't read in a while. It took him twenty or thirty more minutes of looking, because he would get distracted at how cool each and every one of the books in his collection were, and he'd spend time flipping through each one, appreciating the care put into the story and the generally pretty terrific artwork, even in the black-and-white photocopied indie comix.

He hadn't even picked one out in particular yet when he heard the front door open and shut above, then heard the slow, heavy footfalls cross the ceiling over his head that he was very familiar with; it was the gait his father walked when he came home stinking drunk. Ed thought he heard Dad walk over to the TV, like usual, but he heard another door open and shut and didn't hear his footsteps anymore. He must've gone out to the garage, he figured.

Ed found a book he liked that had fallen through the cracks of his memory and cracked it open as he flopped out on the bed. A few minutes later, he heard the garage door to the house open and shut again, and his father slowly made his way back through the house. It was definitely his trot, and he was definitely drunk; when he was, his footfalls were slow and deliberate, as if he planned each one out specifically and strategically to look like he wasn't drunk, but he was so drunk he couldn't tell he walked as slow as a Triffid on the streets of London.

As he came out, he listened to his dad's footsteps make a wide turn as they came around the kitchen and into the hallway, then heard them rise up the squeaky stairs to the second floor. He tried to go back to his book but couldn't concentrate. Not to mention he'd lost his place.

He'd finally found it again when he heard the gunshot that cracked from upstairs and shook the house's very fountain, jolting Ed and sending him jumping up off the bed in fright like a cat, his haunches up just like one, before he fell back down onto the bed. He didn't initially peg the sound as a shotgun blast; what would Dad be doing in the house firing off the shotgun? Another thought ran quickly across his mind; that's what he'd been doing in the garage, evicting the 12 gauge from its prison in the gun safe there.

It took Ed till the second shotgun blast shook the house for it to shake any reason into him, and he jumped off the bed and raced up the stairs to the first floor, then bounded around the hall to run up to the second story, his mind racing the whole way. He thought maybe Dad had shot himself until the second shot had rung out. That meant what else but that he was taking pot shots at Mom and Sarah? He'd fired the gun off twice, afterall. His mind went searching for a best case scenario. Maybe Dad was just blowing holes in the walls or in the ceiling, just generally scaring the shit out of everybody like he had a bad habit of doing when he was drunk.

Maybe, if, and that was _if_ he _had_ taken the shotgun to Sarah or Mom or both, that Sarah or Mom or both had jumped out of the way in the last second and were totally fine, and they'd stay totally fine until Ed made it to the top of the stairs until he could stop Dad, grab him and yank the shotgun away like he'd done with the baseball bat he'd taken to the kitchen two years ago, tearing everything up and nearly breaking Mom's arm with it. Then, when Ed had thrown the bat out the window in a desperate attempt to save himself the pain of it, Dad had beaten the shit out of him anyway with his bare hands. That was the only time he'd ever been to the emergency room where he was the one who was hurt.

Another thought ran through his mind as he leapt from step to step up to the upstairs. He had never beaten Dad in a fight before. He had always only ever gotten his ass kicked by his old man. What hope did he have now of stopping him, wrestling the gun away and stopping him from hurting anybody else? Even in the kitchen with the bat, when he got done with him, he'd gone back to hurting Mom. He had no time for that though. He was running out of time before the next shotgun blast. Then, just before he reached the second floor, another thought ran through his head.

He'd been the one to make Sarah come home tonight.

Ed's socked foot touched the floorboards on the second floor and sent a creak rumbling across them. He spun his head down the hall toward Mom and Sarah's rooms, and as he did, so did Dad as he stood in the hallway between the two rooms, Mom's room's door wide open but Sarah's shut. Dad's shirt, pants, face and arms speckled with hot warm blood, eyes wild but strangely absent as if he'd resigned himself to the back of his subconscious or maybe he was just black-out drunk and his brain had taken five out back.

But his wild, empty eyes found Ed, and Dad began to swing the shotgun around as Ed came running at him, foot after foot slapping the floorboards, and he nearly slipped with each frenzied step in his slippery socks, and he was afraid he'd fall before he reached Dad, and then he'd be on the ground when he got the shotgun around.

Ed ran one foot after the other in the longest strides of his life right at Dad, a Mack truck roaring down the interstate, breaking the speed limit, and Dad was guiding the barrel of the shotgun right at Ed's head, his finger beginning to clasp the hair trigger and Dad's other hand bringing the pump back, ejecting a smoking shell that bounced off the wall, leaving a scorch mark, then bringing the pump forward again -

Dad forgetting to pump the shotgun before Ed came up the stairs, Ed realized, was the only reason his head hadn't been scooped off already. He was looking straight down the barrel now, directly into the black abyss it offered up to him as a glimpse into his future. The shotgun was ready to go now, and Dad squeezed the trigger with the gun levelled at Ed's face.

Ed brought his hand up and knocked the barrel off course and it vomited a fire-hot, spark-spitting, ear-bleedingly loud roar of buckshot from its barrel, the tiny pellets once housed inside the shell losing track of their shape together within and spreading, whizzing through the air inches from Ed's face and eyes and nose and everything they would have blown off if Ed hadn't knocked the barrel away, and they ripped through the wall next to both Ed and Dad's heads, sending both weaving slightly to the side to avoid shrapnel.

Dad was already pumping in the next shell and ejecting the spent one as Ed realized he was still clutching the shotgun because the heat of the barrel burnt his palm and fingers and sent sharp nerves of pain up his wrist, but he didn't let go. He yanked the shotgun as hard as he could, but his father had a death grip on the stock and pump, and Ed instead drug his father across the floor, shoes scuffing and squeaking on the floorboards.

Ed made sure to guide the barrel away from himself as he pulled it along his side, and he brought his hand around and grabbed the rifle between the trigger guard and the pump as Dad pulled the trigger again, spraying fire and buckshot down the hall where it dispersed without much destruction at this distance. Ed heard the pellets rolling across the floor as they lost their power and looked past the shotgun into his father's eyes, which burnt like Ed's hand on the barrel, which was only getting hotter and burning worse.

Ed took his hand off the barrel, not to relieve the pain but to move it down to the pump grabbing his father's hand to try to stop him from racking it.

Ed had the momentum of the 12 gauge and his father's movement at his fingertips, he realized, and he swung them both around to the wall, slamming Dad's back into it as Ed tried to pry Dad's fingers off the pump. The shock of the hit against the wall loosened Dad's grip from the trigger and he let it go to punch Ed in the head or chest, whichever his knuckles met first.

Ed yanked the shotgun away, prying Dad's fingers back, and, for one stunned moment, thought he'd won. Then Dad's fist hit Ed in the breastbone and knocked the air out of him, and he dropped the shotgun onto the floor and fell back, putting his arm back to catch the wall before he hit the floor.

Ed's father scrambled for the shotgun and reached out for it with his left arm, reaching it under his right as Ed still gripped the right's fingers in his hand. Ed saw past Dad as the old man reached for the gun, and saw that they were right across from the staircase to the downstairs.

Ed pulled Dad's hand and felt bones in the fingers either pop or break, and Dad stumbled toward him instead of the gun. Dad fell onto Ed, who let go of his father's fingers and grabbed Dad with both hands, balling up fistfuls of fabric from Dad's shirt, shoving himself back off the wall with his elbows. He thrust Dad back, whipping his momentum the other way, shoving him back and back and back, and it seemed like the stairs would never get there, time was moving so slowly, and then Dad's dead eyes popped wide open in shock as his shoes found nowhere to step underneath him. Dad fell down the stairs and Ed followed down with him.

Dad's feet hit the steps below at a bad angle and he shouted and tipped backwards, and they sailed down the stairs through the air for a moment before Dad's back found the edges of the stairs underneath him and slammed painfully into them.

Then Ed was flying forward over his dad, his head sailing down toward the stairs below. He tucked his head down as he fell and brought his arms up, and hit on his elbows and then rolled onto his back, smashing into the edges of the steps just like his dad above, pain lighting through Ed's back and chest and shooting fireworks through his eyeballs and they both tumbled down the stairs together. They tumbled over each other and against the railing and the wall, and then before long they hit the floor on the ground level of the house.

Ed's brain was scrambled at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at the front door in front of him and ceiling past it. Near Ed, Dad was stumbling to his feet.

Dad was up on his feet in no time. He'd taken his share of head injuries. Ed was coming up to his own feet when Dad, his eyes dull and jaw slack, brought his foot up and kicked Ed in the shoulder, sending him flying back into the front door, slamming into it painfully.

Ed heard a voice he recognized as both feminine and familiar calling his name from up the stairs as he recovered, and quickly realized Sarah was screaming his name. "Stay there, baby sister!" Ed cried as loud as he could up the stairs, hoping Sarah could hear him.

As Dad reared back for another blow, either fist or foot, Ed didn't wait to guess which, Ed threw himself up and across the floor at his dad, tackling him back into the stairs, sending them smashing into and through the bannister at the base. They tore straight through it and Ed landed on top of Dad on the floor of the hallway beyond, knocking the air out of Dad's lungs, shocking him into a moment's calm, and Ed took the time to climb up on top of his father, put his knees in the man's stomach and start swinging fists at the old man's head.

Dad recovered from his calm and put his arms up to shield his face.

Ed heard running footfalls above and turned as they came down the stairs to see Sarah running full tilt for the front door. "RUN, BABY SISTER!" he cried.

Suddenly Dad bucked, twisting out from under Ed's weight, and Ed fell against the wall as Dad stumbled back up to his feet, bringing down onto Ed a series of his own fists. Fist after fist, beating Ed to the ground.

Ed hunkered down and crawled forward, protecting his head like his father had. Dad swung and swung and swung. Most fists hit and they hit hard, but some missed went flying through the air. Dad put a lot of momentum into one punch and swung and missed, and fell on top of Ed, knocking the wind out of his son again. Dad was too drunk to get up immediately.

Ed kicked and flailed and crawled out of from under Dad as Dad clawed at his neck and back, then grabbed onto Ed's pants at the waist and let Ed drag him along by them. Ed's pants were coming down.

Ed stumbled to his feet and knocked his dad off with a kick, but Dad caught Ed's leg in his free hand and took Ed back to the ground, this time next to the doorway into the kitchen, and all Ed could see inside that kitchen were the glistening blades of Mom's collection of kitchen knifes sheathed in the knife block on the counter. Just a few feet away.

He started crawling for the kitchen with his dad grabbing onto his legs. Ed yanked one away from his reach and sent the bottom of his sock right into Dad's nose, and it shot blood right out onto the floor.

Dad snorted and coughed, surprised at the sudden, overwhelming taste of blood that poured into his mouth. He hocked a bloody loogie at Ed as Ed slipped from his grasp, skittering up to his feet and running right at the knife rack across from him in the kitchen.

Dad jumped up, right after him, right on his ass, and as Ed reached for the knives in the rack, Dad slammed his weight into his son's back and knocked him into the counter, once again knocking the wind out of him, and his hand overshot the knives, sending it skidding across the counter and bouncing off the wall. Ed flailed at it with both hands, knocking it around instead of grabbing it, and Dad wrapped an arm around Ed' neck, taking a hold of one of Ed's hands with his other. With his free hand, Ed knocked the knife rack over into the sink basin, spilling the razor-sharp blades all over the basin and felt like the dumbest motherfucker who ever lived.

Dad took his hand off Ed's arm and grabbed Ed's head with it. He took his other arm out from around Ed's neck and put it on the other side of Ed's head, then bashed Ed's head down into the counter. Ed's face bounced off it and he felt a torrent of blood run from his nose down his mouth before Dad slammed him into the counter again, then a third time for good measure.

Dad took his hands off Ed, and without a say in the matter, Ed toppled over onto the floor instead of continuing the fight with his old man.

The world was spinning and he couldn't get a grip on the tilt-o-whirl. He could see the kitchen, all shaken up and spinning, and he could see Dad but couldn't keep an eye on him. He was trying to stand but slipping and sliding everywhere like everything was covered in oil or something. He just couldn't get a grip. Time was moving slow for Ed, it usually did when people were in life-or-death situations, and especially so when they knew they were about to die. From the way his limbs and head and eyes were working, he wouldn't be able to keep it up with Dad any more. For one of the first times in his life, he'd hit his head too hard. He knew he couldn't make it up before Dad got one of the knives and stuck him with it, but that didn't stop Ed from tryin to get up.

As Ed struggled to stand, Dad reached into the sink basin, which sat under a window to the outside and picked up a knife from inside. He went to turn to face Ed, grimly but heroically, if only in his own mind, but he caught a glimpse of bright-colored movement through the window and spun back around to look at it.

He laughed at how much of a drunk, stupid fool he was. He had caught a glimpse of his own, bloody reflection. He laughed at it until he caught silver gleaning through the glass, and then muzzle flares blinded him and bullets cut through the glass and ripped apart the window frame, riddling Ed's Dad with bullets through his chest and neck. The force of the gunshots knocked him back and his arms pinwheeled as he struggled to stay upright.

Eight bullets were fired through the window rapid fire, one blast after another, but only six found their target. One lodged in the window frame and the other shot over Dad's head and stuck in the ceiling above. But another bullet punctured a lung and Ed's Dad felt something in his chest collapse like an accordion. He tried to speak on the matter but found his breath whistling from a hole in his throat instead. A hole which was quickly filling up with blood.

Then he fell down.

Kevin, breathing hard and heavy and erratic, lowered his pistol from the broken window and caught his breath, which took a good minute.

At another house at the other end of the cul-de-sac, in a dark, cluttered space, a voice, twisting and reshaping with each syllabic utterance, whispered into the black void, where it felt at ease, at home. It said, in a tone one (had anyone been present) might have determined as sorrow:

" _Satan est mortuus, Vivat diabolo."_


End file.
